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ANY OTHER UNAUTHORIZED RE-DISTRIBUTION IS A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In this Issue: - Heard on the Net: August 2003 - The Battle for VoIP in the US - 9-1-1: When the Service Provider does not also provide the Access - Free World Dialup Update: 50,000 subscribers and Counting - What's in a Number? - Fall 2003 VON Conference & Expo: Feels like Old Times - The new IPhone Mailing List - Deadline to Join SIPop! 2003: August 29th - Will Internet Telephony Bring About a Revolution in Telecom Policy? - Kids on the Net: The summer my kids discovered Instant Messaging - pulver.com 2003/04 Conference Calendar ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Heard on the Net: August 2003 Earlier this month, Michael Robertson of MP3.com and Lindows fame joined the IP Communications industry with the launch of SIPphone.com. A week later the State of Minnesota ruled that Vonage was a "telecommunications" service and had to comply to the same regulatory issues that other telecommunication providers within the State of Minnesota need to comply to. Vonage is appealing this decision. During this month we also suffered thru two different virus attacks and for some, a blackout that effected 50 million people in the US and Canada. A couple of weeks ago I spent a day in NYC meeting with telecom hedge fund managers and analysts who support mutual funds and the overwhelming sentiment toward VoIP and IP Communications was positive. Fall 2003 VON is lining up to be our largest conference & expo since Spring 2001 VON in Phoenix. Our exhibit hall is just about sold out and it looks like the international delegates will be back, with people representing all of the major continents. The first issue of VON Magazine is just about finished and it will be mailed to our subscribers in September. If you haven't subscribed yet, please take a minute and visit: Total Telecom is currently taking a poll where you can vote on the 5 most "influential people in Communications." While just being nominated is a honor, when you have a moment, please vote by visiting: People on the Move: - Sean Kelly recently left HP and joined Catapult Communications as Vice President of Sales. - Reid Thomas has recently joined Sylantro as Senior Vice President of Sales. - Rami Amit has recently returned to VocalTec, as Vice President, Product Management. - Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan has recently joined VocalTec as Senior Vice President, Strategy. - Alan Law recently joined pulver.com as General Manager for Europe. To be listed in a future "People on the Move" column, please email: people@pulver.com to report a change in your position. Please refer to: "People on the Move" in the subject. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Battle for VoIP in the US Back in February, 2003 after reading the proposed draft resolutions from the Winter NARUC meeting, it was clear to me that trouble was brewing just below the surface for those who may be offering VoIP services in certain States around the US. Back in April, I thought that the State Attorney Generals of both Michigan and Minnesota must have seen the movie or read the book "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick together, since when they both filed against the Free World Dialup petition, they were not filing against FWD in it's present form, but were objecting to what they thought it would evolve into in the future. So they decided to then reject it in it's present form. This also put me on notice that both Michigan and Minnesota should be watched for actions against VoIP. The fact that Minnesota recently took action against Vonage doesn't really surprise me. Just prior to the NARUC Winter 2003 meeting, I asked consumers who cared about VoIP in general to reach out and write to their State Public Utility Commissioners and collectively they had a positive impact. It turns out that now, once again, more than ever, those of you who are in the US who care about keeping VoIP regulation free, need to reach out on a proactive basis and make it known that we want to see a sustained IP Communications Revolution and in fact, create an environment which encourages Entrepreneurs and established companies who wish to offer competitive Broadband IP Voice services to be able to do so. I've been updating a page on the pulver.com website entitled: "Updated: VoIP Regulatory Battle moving to the US States." The page has working summaries of where we are on a State level. The URL is: . After Labor day (in the US) I will begin working on launching a new consumer driven grass-roots effort/coalition to make sure the established US Telecommunications industry knows that there are consumers who care about keeping VoIP regulation free. If there are readers of the Pulver Report who feel inspired to help contribute their resources to help fight this battle, please feel free to email: jeffp@pulver.com. My hope and expectation is to bring together a coalition of consumers of the willing who believe in VoIP together with the service providers who still want to make a difference. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9-1-1: When the Service Provider does not also provide the Access Ever since the blackout of 2003, I've been thinking about 9-1-1 and what happens in the cases where access and service are separated. Mostly because I lost wireless access even though my cell phone still had battery life coupled with when I finally got home, I lost the ability to place IP calls, since while home power was restored, it took an additional 12+ hours to get my cable service to become available again. 9-1-1 traditionally has assumed that the service provider also provides the access and there is no separation. The advent of IP has changed all that, although the rules and regulations on both a US State and Federal level in the US do not seem to reflect this concept just yet, and because of this, it seems that for all of our innovations, at the end of the day, those innovators who choose to offer VoIP services mapped with individual inbound DID numbers, will be placed in the box that the regulators choose rather than given the opportunity to be different and perhaps help change the rules along the way. So I guess what I'm asking is with regard to the US 9-1-1 requirements, if the service provider is not also the access provider, how can that company really be responsible for a 9-1-1 solution "at all times" ? With regard to the growing number of voice over broadband service providers, "voice" in reality is treated as an agnostic IP based application which runs across the public internet and the local access of a high-speed service provider chosen by the subscriber. When/if the underlying local access network fails, how can the application service provider become responsible for 9-1-1 compliance? Is the problem what some regulators would consider "consumer expectations" based on the marketing approach of a given service provider to determine whether or not they are positioning themselves as providing a "replacement" service rather than secondary service irregardless to whether or not the company is offering what is deemed to be a "telecommunications" service or "information" service on a Federal level? Is it not possible that the rules for 9-1-1 need to be re-addressed for IP based service providers deemed to be providing "telecommunication" services? Until the technology platforms are reflected in the regulatory platforms, is it not also possible that there will always be an uphill battle if one is fighting with legacy players? Driving home the day after the blackout from Montreal to New York City after being stranded in Montreal due to the blackout, and experiencing first hand the huge outages of the wireless coverage, if there was an emergency to be reported on the roads on that day, it most likely could not have been reported using wireless. Does this mean that any Wireless service provider would have been held responsible for such issues? If my primary form of communication was VoIP over broadband and my cable service is out, and I can't place an emergency call, who is ultimately responsible for this (or really should be?) How can the application service provider be responsible for some aspects of the 9-1-1 issues if they are not in control or supply the access? And if there are exceptions, who decides the circumstances when the rules can be broken? I don't have these answers and would appreciate the feedback. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free World Dialup Update: 50,000 subscribers and Counting... In less than a month, FWD has gained over 10,000 additional subscribers and we are on a pace to have between 75,000 to 100,000 subscribers by the end of this year. During the past month we introduced a few new "experimental" services, including FWD Vanity Numbers, and the support of both the Tellme and Voxeo development platforms for vXML/CCXML developers. In addition, Meetup.com has recognized Free World Dialup as a "Meetup Topic" and has assigned the 3rd Wednesday of each month as "International Free World Dialup Meetup Day." To join the FWD Meetup community, please visit: http://freeworldialup.meetup.com. To date FWDers in over 90 cites around the world have signed up. A member of the 55555 "Welcome Phone" Team from Sweden recently wrote in: Subject: Keeping families together "I have a lot of fun answering the 55555 line. It is always great to hear people who actually make their first (S)IP call, but sometimes they even tell the story behind their interest in FWD. Usually it is about keeping in touch with parents/children. Like the lady who called and told me that she wanted to send a SIP phone to her parents in China. The other day there was a young guy who was configuring an ATA box to send it to Sri Lanka. Yesterday morning an elderly gentleman from Ohio called with Xlite, and he was testing this because his son was moving to Bulgaria to work there as an English teacher, and he wanted to keep in touch with him. Well, I know that there are thousands of similar stories, but I think it is sort of moving to see that SIP is now available to and is being used by non-technical people in order to keep their families together." It is seeing letters like the one above that provides the inspiration to keep moving forward on Free World Dialup. :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What's in a Number? Recently, we added a new feature to Free World Dialup, the support of "Vanity Numbers." The idea behind this was to empower the FWD community to be able to select any number that they wanted to be associated with, as long as it is between 6 and 26 digits long, rather than just deal with the number they were assigned when they signed up for FWD in the first place. In order to dial these vanity/custom numbers within the FWD network, people need to first enter the private FWD code of 393 which designates that the numbers that follow should be treated as aliases internal to the FWD number assignments. While there are many people who believe a phone number should follow a certain structure and in effect comply with a legacy environment which restricts the way a phone number can be used, people also forget that within Free World Dialup a number is just a string. FWD is just software based running on a few Linux servers and we are nothing more than a real-time reflection of the community of people who are using FWD. There isn't any intent on our side to map the 393 + [6-26] digits to anything else other than someone's assigned internal FWD number. That's the whole point about this new "experimental" service. We have no plans to nor need to ever worry about overlays, numbering plans, etc. I'm looking towards the future rather than being constrained by what others would consider legacy thinking. My hope is that fundamentally FWD will continue to evolve without regard to the legacy of the past but rather the potential brilliance of our future. Please remember that inventions are nothing more than "bad mistakes" and my hope is that we will still continue to stumble across the future learning, making mistakes, innovating and for some, inventing the future of communications one step and day at a time. The first FWD number assigned was 10000. We have been mostly incrementing by 1 since November 11, 2002 and at the moment (August 24th) there are currently about 50,200 subscribers in 150+ countries who use FWD as a communications network. The FWD numbers that are in production today are 5 and 6 digit numbers and in the future I expect that we will move formally to 7 digits (or more) as we continue to grow. For those people who wanted to have the flexibility of being able to create their own numbers, we figured why not provide the platform to do so? The 393 prefix was added by us as a way to internally support our own "legacy" numbering plan. Being on the internet and being around creative people, I see no harm in encouraging people be as creative as possible. This said, and because I always thought it would be cool to be able to be reached as jeff.pulver@fwd.pulver.com we also opened the door to support text aliases to assigned FWD numbers. I'm not sure where a SIP URI really fits into any number plan either...and in any case, the "core" FWD number that these aliases internally maps to right now is still only 5 or 6 digits so in reality I don't see anything being "broken." We are trying to be a little innovative with the introduction of * and ** dialing when placing calls outside of the FWD network. Anyway, let's see how this evolves. I expect this to continue to be fun, even if some people don't always understand or get the vision. A couple of weeks ago I received an interesting email and follow up phone call from Sprint claiming that our FWD dialing code of 1010333 which was used to dial from FWD to deltathree iConnect Here customers was of concern to Sprint since they are the owners of 1010333. While I tried to explain that 1010333 was internal to FWD, rather than fighting, we removed the reference to 1010333 from our website and going forward, people who wish to dial into ICH will have to dial **333 instead. In the end I just have to ask, "What's in a Number?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fall 2003 VON Conference & Expo: Feels like Old Times The Fall 2003 VON Conference & Expo will be taking place in Boston on September 22-25th. Since 1997, a leading barometer of how well, in a relative sense, the VoIP Industry was doing were the number of people who registered for one of our US VON events at the point of our "early bird" cutoff which is 7 weeks before the start of the show. In historical terms, we have found that the number of registered conference delegates can be predicted within +-10% based on the number of delegates we are at on the close of our "early bird" period. While the Fall 2003 VON event has seen a strong rebound in our exhibit sales and related marketing opportunities which support the show, so much so that we knew our exhibit floor was going to be our largest in 2 years, the same can now be said about of our Fall conference! The Fall 2003 VON Conference will be our largest VON Conference in two years. This is the kind of "warm & fuzzy" metric that I was hoping to experience when I arranged to get VON back from Key3Media back in January. In short, We're Back! :-) The Fall Conference sessions will be extraordinary, as worldwide demand for VoIP continues to explode. A remarkable group of service providers will be in Boston to discuss their plans, including: Verizon, Vonage, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, Level 3, AT&T, MCI, Bell Canada, Telus, Sprint, Vonage, NTT, Bredband, and SBC. Amongst the VON Keynotes will be Jeffrey Citron, CEO of Vonage and Michael Robertson, CEO of SIPphone, two people who are having an effect on the state of consumer communications. Given all of the regulatory issues the industry is possibly facing, the timing for our 2003 Telecom Policy Summit on September 22nd couldn't have been much better. Check the conference schedule at . To register for VON, please visit: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The new IPhone Mailing Lst I recently created a new mailing list for the general discussion of internet phoning which is the "IPhone" mailing list. People familiar with the history of pulver.com may remember that the pulver.com IPhone list was a very popular mailing list back in 1995-1997. People can subscribe to the new IPhone list by visiting: . My expectation is that we can discuss some more general internet communication issues and technologies on the iphone list and explore other commercial broadband communication services, platforms and products. When you subscribe to the list please take a moment and introduce yourself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Deadline to Join SIPop! 2003: August 29th Jim Toga, is heading up our SIPop! event occurring during the Fall VON in Boston, September 23-25. We are at the final planning stages of the event and if you are interested in signing up for SIPop! 2003 and haven't done so already, you only have until August 29th to make your decision. For a relatively small cost you can take part in the largest event of its kind anywhere. SIPop! is THE rapidly growing forum to highlight generally available products in complete end-end installation usage scenarios. Market leaders in all product spaces have always been the initial and consistent participants in these types of events. * Show your products to real customers in a real world environment * Let customers see for themselves, your products working with complementary and industry leading products * Leverage the corporate marketing exposure and positive exposure provided by pulver.com * Gain very specific insights into what your customers needs and desires are * Visible inter-operability and longevity provides tremendous customer credibility We provide all the physical resources (table, IP connectivity, and support) to demonstrate things completely independent of activities in your main show booth. We do require that you man the SIPop! table such that you can participate in all scenarios that you have committed to. If you would like to join SIPop! 2003, please contact Farrell Shapiro +1.631.961.8957 or to reserve your spot by August 29th. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Will Internet Telephony Bring About a Revolution in Telecom Policy? The Cato Institute is hosting a free policy forum in Washington, DC on September 9th. This hour and half roundtable includes: Scott Marcus, FCC; Link Hoewing, Verizon, Brad Ramsay, NARUC, Marilyn Cade, AT&T and myself. "Many Internet engineers and technologists have long dreamed about a day when voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service, or .Internet telephony,. would supplement if not totally supplant, traditional analog, circuit-switched communications networks. This dream may soon become a reality as the VoIP service has blossomed and is increasingly being used by consumers to bypass traditional phone lines and regulations. The revolutionary impact of VoIP has not gone unnoticed by policy makers, however, as discussions are underway at the federal and state level about how to regulate Internet telephony as it grows more popular. Should VoIP be treated like traditional telecommunications services and regulated and taxed accordingly, or is a new regulatory regime in order? And can VoIP be regulated at all given the ubiquitous nature of Internet communications? These issues will be discussed by a diverse panel of industry experts." For more information and to register, please visit: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kids on the Net: The summer my kids discovered Instant Messaging While my twin sons have been living with the internet since they were 3 years old, it was literally only yesterday when they were 9 1/2 that they used AOL Instant Messenger for the first time. It took a visit by a cousin from out of town who they watched spend six hours IMing his own friends while he was here on Thursday to get my own kids interested in getting setup with their own screen names for AOL IM. (Their 12 year old cousin had over 160 people on his own buddy list which is a lot for anyone I know.) I'm not sure what the experience of other parents has been and I'm not sure if being 9 1/2 is too young to have an IM presence but for now, I'm going with the flow and plan on carefully observing the way my kids adapt to using IM to keep tabs on their family members. Until now my kids had been obsessive checking certain web pages for hints on their Gameboy playing, whether it was for the latest Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! or Megaman games. It will be interesting to see how they start using IM in our always-on home and during the coming school year when they enter 4th Grade. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pulver.com 2003/4 Conference Calendar ( http://pulver.com/conference ) "Events for the Communications Industry" (tm) September 22-25 - Fall 2003 VON Conference & Expo, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA ( http://pulver.com/von ) September 23-25 - SIPop! 2003, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA ( http://pulver.com/sipop ) September 30 - October 1 - RVC SoftEdge 2003 ( http://pulver.com/rvc2003 ) November 11-12 - 2003 Wireless Internet Summit Santa Clara, CA ( http://pulver.com/wirelesssummit ) - 2004 - January 27-29 - IP Communication Industry Executive Summit Sophia Antipolis, France March 28 - March 31st - Spring 2004 VON Conference & Expo Santa Clara, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are aware of others who would like to receive the Pulver Report, please visit ( http://pulver.com/reports/subscribe.html ). To unsubscribe, please visit ( http://pulver.com/reports/unsubscribe.html ) Please send your comments and feedback regarding this issue of The Pulver Report to: jeff@pulver.com. Jeff Pulver Tel. +1.631.961.8951 The Pulver Report Fax. +1.631.396.3996 August 25, 2003 http://pulver.com/reports ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (c) 2003 pulver.com, Inc., All Rights Reserved. ========================================================================