About Free World Dialup - History and Reflections
- Jeff Pulver - November 20, 2002
During the Winter of 1995, with the help of Izak from Jakarta, Indonesia,
Brandon from Tokyo, Japan and Connie from Tacoma, WA,
the Free World Dialup project was launched.
Life was a little simpler back then but the promise of the vision was to
enable consumers to be able to make free phone calls by taking advantage
of the internet. Nobody really challenged us on why somebody should
contribute resources for free or asked "what's in it for me?" when asked to
setup a single-port gateway. Instead, we shared a moment in the history of
the internet when consumers realized the internet could be used for more
than just the sharing of email. Service providers didn't focus and didn't
care much about the "Free" part of Free World Dialup. (A network of
one-port gateways was not a threat to anyone.) This said, we were responsible
for launching what was the first IP Telephony Network, which was at the
time, a PC to Phone network.
Another effort in 1997 brought forward a free phone to phone service, with
the continued dedicated help of people like Connie acting as the liaison
between the gateway operators. This version of Free world Dialup lasted
until 1999 and provided many people with free PSTN/IP connectivity to
quite a few locations around the world.
It's been a while, but last week the 3rd iteration of Free world Dialup
launched, and this time it is a 100% SIP based, peer-to-peer,
end-to-end broadband IP solution designed for people who wish to use
dedicated IP Phone edge devices. ( Softphone SIP clients also work,
but I am encouraging consumers to use a dedicated hardware device so
that they don't confuse FWD with a pc-to-pc service.)
I first decided to relaunch Free World Dialup this past summer and
after thinking about what this version accomplishes, one could argue
that my talk at Spring 2001 VON became a self-fulfilling prophecy in
as much as back then I spoke about enabling end-to-end IP in a
broadband infrastructure and watching what happens when the end-user
community gets empowered. My theme at Spring 2001 came from
The Beatles '...and in the end, the love you take is equal to the
love you make.' This version of Free World Dialup does not provide
any connectivity with the PSTN or any other legacy carrier networks
but rather focuses on connecting people with people.
At this moment there are currently over 1,100 people registered for
Free World Dialup,
representing individuals from over 50 countries. In the past few days
I've spoken to FWDers from: New York, New Jersey, Mexico and Kuwait
and each time was amazed with the CD quality audio that we were
experiencing. The quality is better than cellular and almost as
good as being there. :-)
More information about Free World Dialup is available at:
( http://pulver.com/fwd )
You can also join the FWD mailing list by visiting:
(
http://listserv.pulver.com/cgi-bin/wa.exe?SUBED1=fwd&A=1 )
You can view the FWD Mailing list archives by clicking:
here.
If you would like to experiment using FWD, please register for
the free service and after leaving a test message at FWD# 10001,
please feel free to email
me and we can setup a time to talk. ;-)
p.s. During the business work day, I'm also usually available at
FWD# 10000. Please feel free to call and introduce yourself.
