Free World Dial-Up. The name just breathes a certain anarchy appropriate to the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Which, from The Phone Company’s point of view, is exactly what it was when the world’s first IP phone network debuted in 1995.

Now FWD’s founder and sole financer Jeff Pulver – it’s not exaggerating to call him the Abraham of VoIP – has decided that it’s time for his baby to stand on its own two feet.

In keeping with Pulver’s vision of “participatory communications,” last Friday FWD users were asked to support the service as paying members, who will cooperatively set the organization’s priorities and determine its future direction.

So far the response has been promising, according to FWD president Daniel Berninger, with several hundred users signing up for the $30 individual membership and a number of business users signing up at the $300 business level. FWD has about 700,000 users, with about 30,000 online at any given time.

“Once we get on our feet and sustaining, and it’s member-driven, we can focus on members’ priorities,” explains FWD president Daniel Berninger. “One of the complaints [by members] over the years has been about support and reliability. One of our top priorities is to look at reliability and support and streamline those.”

But that’s just the beginning. Just as FWD was “disruptive” – one of Pulver’s favorite phrases – in 1995, the organization continues to advance that mission in its new incarnation.

“FWD is really about evangelism for the [VoIP] industry and ecosystem,” Berninger says. “We say to people, use FWD and all the other services out there — all the options for people, all the alternatives to the phone company. Our goal is not survive or fail on any one service.”

For businesses, this evangelism plays out to make FWD a business development platform, according to Berninger.

“The good thing today is that we have a lot more options to communicate. The bad news is that it’s really complicated. What FWD tries to do is help people navigate that complexity. The basic idea is to provide tools for people to create their own solutions.”

That’s why the FWD network was always open to any IP network, and any IP phone or ATA can be configured to work with the service.

In addition to continuing the focus on opening new alternatives, the organization is also looking at evaluating the growing number of VoIP/WiFi handsets. “We want to show that you can do some interesting things with VoIP/WiFi handsets,” says Berninger.

One thing that won’t be a focus is the PSTN. FWD began as an exclusively IP network, and while it has added some out-calling features, the service remains focused on IP communications.

“Since we were looking to provide an alternative to the PSTN, we’re not in a hurry to interconnect,” Berninger explains, calling the PSTN “the third rail” for IP voice communications because of taxes, regulation and E-911.

“We’ve had a number of requests [for PSTN connection]. But we’re trying to break people of that habit,” he says, adding, “It’s a very different world view.” You could call it disruptive.

TelTel COO Jack Chang calls his vision for the future of communications the PSIPTN. It’s not just cute. It telegraphs Chang’s essential axioms.

First, Internet telephony needs to be as plug-and-play as POTS for consumers. Second, down the road we’re not going to be talking about the merits of competing multi-media IP protocols any more than we’re talking about the merits of competing analog telephony protocols.

“SIP is similar to the PC world in the early 80s,” Chang says. “More and more applications are becoming SIP-compliant. Cisco earlier this year announced adoption of SIP.”

With an estimated 2 million registered international users for its VoIP service, TelTel is probably one of the best-kept secrets in VoIP, By comparison, Jeff Pulver’s much better-known Free World Dialup, has some 600,000 users.

But Tel Tel is working hard to get consumer attention. The service is adding 100,000 users a month and is the world’s largest SIP-based user community, according to Chang. In March, TelTel introduced a sleek D-Link flip-style WiFi handset that retails for about $200.

The company’s service and business model is virtually identical to Skype’s. But Chang is banking on SIP’s open-ness to beat Skype at its own game and he’s evangelical about the possibilities of the SIP ecosystem.

“People think that VoIP is all about making cheap calls,” he says. “While we don’t disagree, VoIP is about a lot more. Vonage’s business model depends on the PSTN. We think that calling the PSTN is a ‘necessary evil.’ For the company to grow, we cannot depend on that.”

Instead, the company’s long-term goal is providing the backbone for businesses to deliver all kinds of services over the Internet.

“Our philosophy is to promote on-Net traffic and generate revenue from on-Net traffic, to be a platform for a new generation of services. Once you have all these devices using SIP, it opens up a lot of services — video, gaming, conferencing,” Chang says, using as an example is a surveillance camera that makes a phone call and emails a video when it detects motion.

In addition to its embrace of SIP, there is another important difference between TelTel and Skype. TelTel uses a managed peer-to-peer network. “With Skype’s peer-to-peer [model] there is no management for voice packets,” explains Chang. “Voice quality can’t be guaranteed. TelTel uses special servers to ensure QoS.”

TelTel is the second company started by entrepreneur Sherman Tuan, whose IT service company AboveNet went public in 1997 and was subsequently bought by Metromedia Fiber Networks.

Chang is also a serial entrepreneur. He founded Blue Silicon, a provider of hosted unified and multi-media messaging, and Carmel Connection a manufacturer of corporate voice, fax and mail products.

After AboveNet, the growing opportunities presented by the Internet beckoned to Tuan. “We wanted to take advantage of the Internet as it is today — ubiquitous,” says Chang.

The company debuted its VoIP service in 2004 and currently employs about 60 in its Santa Clara, CA headquarters as well as an overseas support and operations team. TelTel also offers its service to service providers as a private branded service.

Cable giant Comcast’s announcement today that it has hit the 1 million mark in “digital voice” customer subscribers won’t be construed as good news by the hundreds of “single-play” service providers that used to view Vonage and its $300 per customer marketing campaign as the New York Yankees (or Manchester United for you fans of real sport) of VoIP.

At first glance, it appears that yet another deep-pocketed entrant is trying to scoop up customers by spending millions in marketing — a hard act to compete against.

Perhaps, though, there’s a different way to view Comcast’s self-professed success, a way that shakes smaller VoIP players out of the no-win hole they have inadvertently dug for themselves.

The key is actually right in the Comcast marketing message, which I have now probably heard on the 24-hour news station my car radio appears to be stuck on about a thousand times. The message is simple: cable TV, internet access and unlimited telephone calls bundled together at $33 per service. The pitch is, of course, the technology (in the form of bundling), not the price.

There are plenty of players out there offering unlimited phone calls for about $20 a month, and they are having a tough time picking up more than a handful of new subscribers a week. Comcast is getting thousands and openly advertising a 65 percent price premium.

Is there something to be learned from this? Of course: technology trumps price.

And when it comes to technology, the smaller VoIP providers have a huge advantage over slow-moving dinosaurs like Comcast.

Unfortunately, it’s an advantage they don’t use out of misplaced fear.

Go to any of the established VoIP providers’ web pages and you’ll see they all say the same thing: “Save money.”

Go to the Cingular and Verizon pages and you’ll see a different message: “Get the latest toy.”

There are plenty of amazing toys for VoIP coming out daily, but you would never know it by hanging out on Vonage’s, BroadVoice or SunRocket’s pages. They try to sell you on price, which is a sure-loser of a tactic in a race to zero against wealthier foes.

To make matters worse, many of today’s smaller providers do everything in their power to discourage use of anything but the functionally limited analog device they send out to new customers. Use their device, hook up an old telephone to it, and that’s it. Don’t try to use your snazzy new WiFi phone, or, worse, connect to the service through powerful PBXes such as Asterisk or Communigate Pro. They don’t support it and are so paranoid of people actually using their service to make more than the average number of calls, they won’t even give you the basic information required to make it work.

When Jeff Pulver’s FWD service first started gaining traction (well before the kings of software and music piracy at Kazaa “invented” Skype as a proprietary FWD clone), the possibilities for VoIP seemed endless. Pulver envisioned a communications future shaped by innovation, creativity and community. Unfortunately, the service providers did everything in their power to stifle the fast-moving status-quo disrupting world Pulver and his band of early pioneers were helping to create.

Innovation? Too hard to support. Creativity? Takes too much time. Community? Where’s the money in that?

Now, if they want to survive, service providers need to go back to the pioneering ways. A major change in direction is in order. Stop packaging VoIP service as something that will save customers pennies a day and works exactly like their old phone does. The new approach needs to encourage the use of VoIP because it is infinitely more powerful than what we’ve used for 100 years.

We’ll use your service, we’ll even pay a bit more for it. But let us use it in the way we choose, with the device (or, even, multiple devices) we choose. New hardware or software comes on the market? Jump on it, don’t run away from it.

There’s a world of people out there ready to embrace change. This world’s the future of VoIP. And unless today’s service providers become part of it and soon, it will be Comcast’s world to rule.