Free World Dialup Under The Gun Again

PetiePooo writes "The FCC will be holding an Open Commission Meeting [PDF] Thursday. Number one on the agenda is a 'Petition for Declaratory Ruling that Pulver.com's Free World Dialup is neither Telecommunications nor a Telecommunications Service.' By passing this, the FCC will, in Jeff's words, 'send a strong signal to consumers and capital markets that the FCC is not interested in subjecting end-to-end IP Communications services to traditional voice telecom regulation under the Communications Act.' For those unfamiliar with it, FWD is sort of like DNS for VoIP. You give it a FWD phone number, it gives you the IP address of the associated SIP phone. Slashdot touched on FWD three years ago, and again last year."

Comments

New Regulations?

[TechnologyX]

Would this mean that the FCC will instead write up new regulations and restrictions for VoIP? Instead of lumping it under Telecommunications?

FWD rocks

[andersen]

I have a Sipura SPA-2000 (which is very very cool) connected to 2 phone lines in my 4 line phone (one line is empty, the forth line connects to my local land line and lets us conference in other people who don't use VOIP yet). I use it to call my business partners for free over the net. That saves us a ton of money over using traditional land lines and paying long distance. Call quality is excellent, and the FWD service works perfectly. We each pay our local ISP for broadband net access (which we were doing anyway before we switched to using VOIP).

FWD works great and I highly recommend it. They even provide voice mail. Pulver has done a great thing, and the FCC has absolutely no business screwing it up! I don't need to call 911 over IP, and I don't want regulatory access fees and taxes to pay for 911...