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.

“The Holy Grail of Gadgets”
“Shake-Up for the Phone Industry”
“Will Disrupt the Mobile Phone Market”

These are only a few of today’s headlines heralding the advent of the long-awaited Apple iPhone. In fact the scene at MacWorld, following as it did on Christmas, looked for all the world like the geek Magi adoring the holy child of Cupertino.

With a buildup like this it would be hard not to come up short, even if you’re golden boy Steve Jobs.

So what have we got here?

After all the ooh-ing and ah-ing about the slick, no-tiny-keys-or stylus-in-sight design, it’s…a phone. While the touch screen user interface is heads and shoulders above those of PDAs like Palm and Blackberry, even that is not the dramatic advance it’s made out to be. I use the touch screen on my Treo all the time – without the stylus. It’s an evolution not a revolution.

In terms of functionality, I can’t see that the $500-$600 Apple iPhone does anything that smartphones don’t do already at significantly lower cost and with a choice of service providers, unlike Apple which only offers Cingular service. Looking sexy is not a feature that most business users will pay a premium and sacrifice choice for.

I’m not the only one who’s underwhelmed by Apple’s iPhone. VoIP industry pundit Jeff Pulver’s pulse rate actually lowered.

“It sounds like a device that should work better than other such devices have in the past,” he says. “It’s not about songs or ringtones. What I was looking for was a next generation PDA that happened to be a phone.”

“It’s not the revolutionary change agent we expected from Apple,” he continues. “I had hoped when Apple came out with an iPhone that the little ‘i’ meant something.”

Still, Pulver concedes the device has a pretty face. “Would I like to leave CES with a phone like that? Sure.” Just what you say about arm candy.

Jeff Pulver, the closest thing VoIP has to a founding father, took a good long look at the US election results from Tuesday and concluded that, on balance, the country’s political change of course is potentially good news for internet and communications innovators.

Pulver’s optimism is qualified, though, in that he does not expect Democrats, the party which, today, officially gained control of both houses when Congress reconvenes in January, “will be any less paternalistic than their Republican corollaries” on issues such as emergency calling services, government phone surveillance, indecency statutes and internet regulation.

But the new national political reality, Pulver predicts, may:

• Shift the debate over “net-neutrality” more in the favor of internet innovators and away from the carriers;
• Create a counterbalance to the RBOC-friendly Kevin Martin-chaired FCC;
• Potentially slow down the competition-stifling mega-merger between AT&T and Bell South;
• Probably make Rep. Ed Markey (D.-MA), who Pulver says is “instrumental . . . in holding the line and defending the Internet and communications innovators and enthusiasts”, chair of the House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee.

In fitting irony, Pulver notes how VoIP was extensively used in turning out voters to defeat Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R.-MN), who has proposed new access charges and stifling rules on VoIP usage.

Pulver admits he has paid much less attention to the needs of internet communications on the political front, partly because he “had given up on America and the prospect that it would develop a regulatory framework that might enable Internet entrepreneurs.”

Now he’s gearing up for new challenges in a more promising environment and stresses that, ultimately, the responsibility is in the hands of “the emerging entrepreneurs, innovators, and potential thought-leaders.”

“I know most of us are pretty green in political and lobbying circles,” writes Pulver, “but as Congress, regulators, and governments around the globe place their critical gaze on us as we revolutionize the ways in which the Internet is used to deliver communications and entertainment, we had better start to care and engage and be proactive with government.”

How very true.

The AT&Ts and Verizons of the world have lots of political dough to sprinkle about, lots of K Street suits on the payroll to help them get their way, and many politicians still to willing to do their bidding, no questions asked.

But, if there is anything to be learned from this past election its that it’s still possible for those with little money but great ideas to make themselves heard.

Wednesday morning was a bright new day for the moribund Democratic Party in America. And it’s a bright new day for innovation and entrepeneurship in the internet communcations space.

Now we have to take advantage of it. It’s good to see Pulver energized again. I am.

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.

Seems our Director of Engineering may have ignighted a bit of a dust-up with his VON wrap post, wherein he gave his honest opinion about the IP Communications Industry confab held in Boston from September 12 - 14.

Today, a full two weeks after the fact, I've got people in my ear and in my face pointing out how Tom Keating over at TMC and Garrett Smith at VoIPSupply picked up on Eric's post and used it to get a little conversation going about the health and direction of the IP Communications space, and about the purpose and value of trade shows in general.

I understand Jeff Pulver even had a few WTF comments for our CEO, though this whole thing makes me think just a little bit about Marcelo's very first post in this space about the very nature of the VoIP blogosphere.

So, I'll toss in my two cents and see if I can help straighten out a few things, or whether it just rattles more cages.

To begin with, this isn't the first time Mr. Keating has used his forum to divert our attention here at Voxilla from our main purposes, which are to serve our customers and to provide timely, accurate information about the people, products, and policies that drive our industry. Last year he raised a great stink claiming our reporter, Carolyn Schuk, had stolen one of his ideas for a story we ran on our front page, and basically asked the industry to question our credibility if Ms. Schuk didn't print an apology and give him credit for the story.

Turns out Carolyn had been working on the story for several weeks, long before Tom posted anything about it in his blog, and the "ideas" underlying the whole thing were matters of common knowledge and common sense, accessible to anyone who might care to think about them. After it was clearly proven that Voxilla's reporter had done none of the things of which Mr. Keating accused her, rather than offer an apology to her, he simply removed his original post from the TMC site.

With today's post, Mr. Keating comes at Voxilla in a slightly more oblique manner, but it wrankles me none-the-less. Why lead your item with reference to something two weeks old? If you want to start a conversation about whether Jeff Pulver is turning his focus from Voice to Video after 10 years at the forefront of IP Communications, why not just do that? It seems to me there are any number of good lead-ins that can accomplish the goal of getting a conversation going without using one individual's personal comments to set the stage.

In addition, it's incorrect for Mr. Keating to have said "Voxilla…was disappointed in this past VON show." Eric was personally disappointed for reasons he mentioned in his blog item, but as a company — and I gave Pulvermedia representatives positive comments to this effect at the conclusion of the show — we were actually pleased with the turnout, the vibe, and the opportunities we had to reaffirm some longstanding alliances, and to open doors to new ones.

Now, I think it's all fine and good to have a conversation about the maturation of the IP Communications industry and to speculate on whether video is poised to overwhelm voice as the driver of innovation in the technology, even to fantasize about Jeff Pulver's future focus and motivation. It's also good to question the economic health of the industry and to read in the success or failure of shows like VON and ITEXPO the future of the industry and of the economy in general.

The fact of the matter is there's an awful lot of money floating around out there chasing the Next Big Thing and it seems like a whole lot of people still believe in the money-for-nothing dreams created by the original Dot Com Boom of the Go-Go 90s.

I've been paring down my own expectations for the past several years and looking for people and things of lasting value in my life and in the investments I make of my time and my resources.

I happen to believe the innovations coming out of the globalization of the marketplace and out of the shrinking of barriers to communication being provided by the Internet lie at the heart of some very valuable processes and technologies that will define the way business is conducted and the way people will interact for many years to come. And I feel fortunate to have an opportunity to participate in the development of some of those things, perhaps even to influence them in some small way, by my work with Voxilla.

So, by all means, let's have a little more conversation, but let's keep it to the things that matter, can we?