Q Comm Chief Executive Officer Discusses Company Contracts, Prepaid Wireless Industry and More in Live Teleconference.

Business Editors

OREM, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 19, 2000

Teleconference Recording Available for Seven Days at 800/615-3210

Q Comm International Inc. (OTC BB: QCCM), a prepaid services network for wireless, Thursday announced that the company's Chief Executive Officer Paul Hickey, completed a 25-minute teleconference that started at 4:05 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2000.

Those who missed the teleconference are invited to listen to the recorded event by dialing 800/615-3210 if in the United States and 703/326-3020 if outside the United States. Upon answer, callers should enter pass code 4674423 followed by the pound key. The recorded teleconference will be hosted at these phone numbers for seven days.

The teleconference is also available at Q Comm's website (www.qcomm.com) in both audio and text format.

During the teleconference, Hickey discussed company contracts and plans, the prepaid wireless industry, and more.

Commenting on prepaid wireless market segments and growth factors, Hickey said, " ... Then you have one third of all people who go in to get a billable plan get turned down because of bad credit, that's not a niche that needs prepaid cellular, that's an entire segment -- 30 percent.

"Then you consider there are 90 million Americans who don't even have checking accounts and you start to realize the market for prepaid cellular is probably bigger than the billable cellular market, and in fact it is bigger in every country in Europe as I mentioned before, 57 percent of all cellular users in Europe are prepaid. In the U.S. it's less than 8 percent.

"The Yankee Group, a leading industry research firm, predicts that acceptance of prepaid cellular in the U.S. will begin to resemble Europe in the next few years. So I hope you can see why we are so excited about the future of prepaid cellular here in the U.S."

Commenting on two significant market developments that hint at faster-than-expected growth in the U.S. prepaid wireless industry, Hickey said, " ... The first is a price per minute decrease from AT&T that was announced just a couple of weeks ago. AT&T's new program for prepaid cellular is now as low as 15 cents per minute.

"That's 60% lower than the average price per minute for prepaid cellular at the beginning of this year. This is significant to our company and to the industry because now prepaid cellular is becoming affordable to mainstream America, the general public.

"Over the past two years the price per minute, for the most part, from most carriers has been 60, 70, 80 cents per minute -- way too high to be attractive to the average consumer. Now that the major carriers, like AT&T, have just lowered the price to something reasonable, they have just opened the doors to tens of millions of consumers who want cellular service but couldn't get it or afford it.

"There are 90 million Americans who don't have checking accounts let alone credit that need and want this product; it now just became affordable to them. I believe this price decrease will have an acceleration effect on the growth of prepaid cellular.

"The second significant development in the wireless industry that will have a very positive impact on the prepaid wireless' market growth is the development and emergence of new data applications available on wireless phones. Most new cellular phones today are Web-enabled, which means they can receive data from the Internet such as stock quotes, sports scores, news, etc.

"Many also have the ability now to provide instant messaging. This is just the tip of the iceberg for the different things your wireless phones will be able to do. In the near future your kids will be able to play games on their wireless phones with other kids who have wireless phones which, by the way, they are already doing in Japan.

"That leads me to why these new Web-enabled phones are so significant to the prepaid wireless market. Who do you think adopts and embraces this kind of new technology first? Our kids do! And, do you know how many of them are in the 21 and under category in the United States, the so-called generation Y group? 71 million!

"That's 71 million new prospects who, by the way, don't usually have enough credit to get anything but a prepaid account. Few people really counted on this group being significant right away to the wireless market, but new technology has changed everything.

"When DoCoMo, a Japanese wireless carrier, introduced their Web-enabled, game-sharing wireless phones last year, they had no idea it would become an absolute necessity for every Japanese teenager, but it has. We believe the same will be true next year here in the United States.

"We believe this will be such a hot product for the 71 million generation Y-ers that if they don't have a Web-enabled phone by the end of next year, they won't be part of the cool group.

"Here's the great upside for Q Comm. A lot of these 71 million kids have disposable income, but no credit. They are part of America's cash-based society. Most will have to buy a prepaid wireless, Web-enabled phone to get the service.

"They commonly don't have credit, or credit cards and for the few, whose parents buy this for them, most will not buy a billable plan that allows their kids to spend as much as they want every month. Once again, as these parents or their kids go into retail stores to buy additional airtime for these prepaid wireless, Web-enabled phones, Q Comm makes money.

"When you look at the price per minute coming down, which opens the market to the average consumer, and the emergence of the Web-enabled phones which appeals to the 71 million kids in this country, we believe that we have a very exciting couple of years ahead of ourselves and the opportunity to establish ourselves as a leading infrastructure provider in the prepaid wireless market."

Highlighting the company's business strategy and capability, Hickey said, " ... This win-win combination demonstrates exactly why our business model is working today and will continue to work; we are providing a value-added service to the retailers, resellers, and wireless carriers. And I want to emphasize something that most people don't understand about our business model.

"Once we have a network of stores installed with Qxpress, let's say six months from now Prepaid Direct has 1,000 of their stores using Qxpress and a new carrier or telecom product becomes available and in demand in the marketplace, all we have to do to deliver that product to those 1,000 stores is receive an electronic file from the carrier with their PINs, download them on Q Comm's server and send them electronically to the Qxpress terminals in the stores.

"Overnight we can add a new product to 1,000 stores or 100,000 stores. Essentially what we are building by placing Qxpress terminals in thousands of retail stores is an electronic infrastructure to deliver an almost unlimited amount of products electronically to retail stores.

"I hope those of you listening are starting to see that what we doing right now is much bigger than just selling prepaid wireless to retail stores. We are building an infrastructure, a pipeline or conduit that will become an extremely valuable asset over the next couple of years."

While not suggesting the same growth pattern, in order to illustrate the company's posturing to become extremely profitable, Hickey said, " ... while I don't want to be cliche, we believe that what we are doing has a lot of parallels to what Cisco and Intel did to become so successful in their respective industries.

"Both Cisco and Intel provide products that are essential to the entire industry they are in. It didn't matter whether Dell, Gateway, Compac or HP became the biggest seller of PCs, Intel was providing a product for all of them and anyone else who wanted to be in the PC business.

"As long as the PC industry grew, so did Intel. Likewise, Cisco provides a product that is essential for building out the infrastructure of the Internet. It doesn't matter who makes the Internet grow, as long as the Internet grows, Cisco grows right along with it. And the same is true with Q Comm.

"It doesn't matter who becomes the biggest prepaid wireless carrier in the U.S. or how many carriers there are; as long as the prepaid wireless industry grows, so too does Q Comm, because with Qxpress we are providing a product that is essential to the industry. We are building the traffic infrastructure that is used by everyone else and Qxpress is Q Comm's toll both for all that traffic.

"Which is why I spent a few minutes at the beginning explaining why and how the prepaid wireless market is going to explode here in the U.S."

Shortly after the teleconference, Hickey said, "By listening to today's conference call, people will get a good sense as to why we're different from most resellers and why there's enormous value in our electronic product delivery infrastructure that we're building. Because we've got so many things happening here, it was impossible to cover everything in today's conference call.

"I always welcome phone calls from brokers and investors who would like to know more about Q Comm."

About Q Comm International:

Q Comm International Inc. (www.qcomm.com) is a leading infrastructure provider for the sales and replenishment of prepaid wireless and other telecom services.

To effectively address the fastest growth segment of the telecommunications industry -- prepaid wireless -- Q Comm is rapidly deploying its revolutionary point-of-sale activation platform, Qxpress(TM), and its prepaid wireless products to retailers nationwide.

Q Comm's Qxpress(TM) infrastructure solution acts as a sales delivery conduit through which Q Comm can funnel an almost-infinite bandwidth of products and services from a variety of carriers to participating retailers nationwide; thus giving Q Comm and its partners the ability to exponentially grow sales and profitability at relatively little additional overhead.

For its industry innovation and leadership, Q Comm International Inc. was recently selected as one of the "Top 10 Companies to Watch for 2000" by Intele-Card News, the prepaid telecom industry's leading publication.

This press release contains forward-looking statements. The words "estimate," "possible," and "seeking" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, which speak only as to the date of the statement was made. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted, or quantified. Future events and actual results could differ materially from those set forth in, contemplated by, or underlying the forward-looking statements.

The risks and uncertainties to which forward-looking statements are subject include, but are not limited to, the effect of government regulation, competition and other material risks.