MINO Wireless, a Sunnyvale, CA-based mobile services company, today announced a campaign to promote its International Call from Mobile Phone service through Chinese media in the US. MINO service makes international calls easy and affordable by using Internet (or VoIP) call technology.

With MINO, users can call from the US to China from their mobile phones at 2.2 cents per minute. MINO’s ads are planned to appear in Chinese language print media Singtao and World Journal, on local TV station KTSF, which broadcasts ethnic programming, and on SVC and Singtao Radio. The print ads started running on June 1, 2006 and have drawn a large number of calls both in English and Chinese. “MINO has a very compelling product for people who are calling from the US to China. The convenience and price of our product is unmatched in the market,” said Jing Liu, the CEO of MINO Wireless. “Making overseas Internet calls from the PC has become very popular, and we are bringing these calls to mobile phones”.

While the 2.2 cents per minute rate from U.S. to China is impressive, I'd like to see what would happen to MINO Wireless if they attempted to offer 2.2 cents per minute from calls originating from China and terminating to the U.S. Well, we know China's recent past where they have blocked VoIP and even more recently China bribed/forced/cajoled Google to "censor" (block) certain websites deemed unacceptable to the Chinese communist regime. I certainly doubt China would allow the state-run telephone companies to lose their profit margins to someone like MINO Wireless.

All I can say is that America may not be perfect, but thank God I'm an American

Update:
Someone stated that you can use Voipbuster to call from China to the U.S. Voipbuster is a PC application like Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc. - so they are difficult to block. I thought it was obvious, but my point was NOT about PC VoIP applications being able to call from China to the U.S. PC softphones are a dime-a-dozen and of course you can make calls from China to the U.S. using PC VoIP.

Rather, I was referring to China allowing its citizens to use something akin to Vonage as a landline or mobile phone service replacement to make inexpensive calls to the U.S. Mino Wireless would allow you to use your mobile phone to make VoIP calls with no PC required.

While Chinese citizens are tech-savvy (can do PC VoIP calling), there is a huge market of China citizens that might use broadband VoIP services to REPLACE their home landline, but China's highly regulated telecom industry won't allow it. Or at least if they do, it's the phone companies offering broadband VoIP - at a premium charge of course.