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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."
Would this service be almost impossible to provide if the FCC regulated it as a telecom?
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Would this mean that the FCC will instead write up new regulations and restrictions for VoIP? Instead of lumping it under Telecommunications?
Slashdot sucks
Then this is obviously a dupe news post.
We are always decrying the dearth of technology jobs, but then we laud things like this which make such jobs obsolete. VoIP is a really cool technology which makes telcos (and subsequently jobs at those telcos) obsolete.
I'm trying hard not to become a Luddite here, but how can we save jobs if technology's main goal is to eliminate those jobs? There is always the argument that by eliminating these jobs we can create a new class of higher-level jobs, but as we see demonstrated by VoIP and other things like OSS, mostly we are destroying corporations which are the primary provider of jobs in this country. It's like we've got all these great ideas, but no morality that forces us to step back and evaluate the negative impact that those ideas have.
I have been pwned because my
Since the site is getting real slow with only 3 posts, here is a mirror:
Mirror
Michael Powell was on the tv show Screensavers over at techtv. He stated he didnt want to regulate, and wanted to open services. He made some interesting comments, like how when the FCC didnt regulate what goes on the Internet, all the services, companies and inventions that came out of it. He then started on the free unregulated spectrum they are allowing people to use for Wifi ISPs.
He sounds like hes on the ball for most stuff, was rather impressed he wants the market to grow, and to now cripple it with regulations.
I still don't trust the FCC, but at least it shows he understands the regulation powers of the FCC, and avoiding it. Or maybe he's just not bought by special interests yet.
My concern is if VOIP is not regulated properly, it may become widespread enough that it will affect the revenue the companies that maintain the land lines, and reliability will suffer. Clearly VOIP cannot be as reliable as POTS, as it requires a much more complex consumer hardware and software. Cell phones could be nearly as reliable as POTS except that the wireless companies seem to be more focused on bells and whistles rather than insuring basic service.
It may be that we can no longer afford reliable telephone service. If so, I would like to see that decision made intentionally.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What's the use of this technology? It says on the website at http://www.fwd.pulver.com/index.php?section_id=71
that you can't call traditional POTS or cell phones, only other FWD members or other partner VOIP providers.
I don't have Vonage or the like, but I'm sure I will eventually, but didn't Netmeeting do the same thing back in the Windoze 98 days?
--------------------------------------------- SignalGod ---------------------------------------------
Here's a link to an article about the Feds wanting more time before the FCC rules on VoIP so they can figure out how to tap into VoIP calls.
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...
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
Kiss your privacy goodbye thanks to... You
MoFscker
Use Asterisk. If everyone starts to use asterisk then how are they going to keep track.
How can we possibly keep people in work if cars make all those horse salesmen, stablers, saddlers, buggy makers, blacksmiths etc obsolete! It will be a job holocaust! Nobody will be working except the car drivers!
Fool, learn the lesson of history, what's being destroyed is inefficient jobs. Not only will the new tech create replacement jobs directly, but indirectly through efficiency gains (money not wasted on one thing can be additionally spent upon another) and through enabling whole new types of job.
All protectionists and luddites should have learned by now that their ideas are pure crap. So they should shut up.
VOIP is no more "telecommunications service" than instant messaging is. One goes over powerlines that are routed through trunks at your telephone company and involve charges across state lines and intercompany transmission fees/credits and government regulation, state utilities, utility commissions, government employees, oversight, etc.
The other is sending bits of data from one computer, over the internet, to another computer. Some bits may be recombined to produce "talking" or another bunch of bits may recombine to produce images of a videogame or an email. In this case, it's voices.
The only thing at issue here is whether or not the old phone companies can be given welfare and sort of a "mafia" type protection so that VOIP can't compete with them and THEY can control it. It's like Don Corlione moving into another drug product and forcing everyone who was selling it out of their territory.
I for one welcome our new Amish overlords.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist...)
Go ahead and mod me a troll, I've got karma to burn ;)
However, I think this is a point people often overlook:
Assuming VoIP takes over the current Telco system...
Who is going to pay for the infrastructure? This all takes money to keep in order. If phone companies aren't around, you will be making up the payments to your internet connection provider.
In truth, technology may eliminate some jobs, but it always creates MORE jobs. It merely moves them from one business to another.
I disagree. Technology just plain eliminates jobs.
Society, however, creates new ones to fill the gap.
I agree with you that we are not going to be in a situation where we cannot get any jobs for people. The folks proposing things like this are ridiculous. Luxury items have *always* filled up the gaps -- the wealth always pay a premium for some new status symbol or slight standard-of-living increase.
In India, it is quite financially feasible for a moderately wealthy person to have a number of servants. In the United States, *very* few people have a number of servants, because human labor is so expensive relative to most people's income -- we have a very strong middle class. There are lots of people who would be interested in getting a maid, a gardener, etc if they could afford to do so.
The fact that many people that would like to have servants do not have them is simply because of the fact that we have a vast number of jobs to fill, and people have gone for more desireable ones.
That was just a single example. Are machine-made items generally more uniform, higher quality, more efficient to produce, and cheaper? Sure. However, they don't have the character that hand-made items do. They aren't *unique*. In the US, human labor is expensive (again, lots of jobs relative to the number of people.), so hand-made items are rare, but still purchased by the wealthy. If technology eliminates more jobs, hand-made goods will become more affordable. Yes, you could cheaply get a photograph of a painting on your wall, but it's just not the *same* as having the original painting on your wall.
Our productivity always increases. If we wanted to retain an 1800s standard-of-living, then we would have had most of the population out of work a long time ago. Demands on standard-of-living always cause increases. Heck, today I can walk into my living room (I live in a house with numerous rooms -- far more than the two rooms that the poor would have had a few hundred years ago.) I can turn on the television. A few hundred years ago, the wealthiest king could have had perhaps multiple sets of performers playing at a major event -- a feast, a wedding, etc. I have something like *forty* different stages of performers constantly performing (channels), any of which I can watch. I can even repeat bits I like. The movies and shows contain content that simply could not have been produced in mideval times.
I can go down to the store and choose just about any food I want in the world, and I can afford it. I can eat oranges in the dead of winter, if I want to do so (and I just did this morning). I can eat *ice cream*, which used to be something that was pricy even for royalty.
I wear clothes that have a finer knit, are more durable, and probably more brightly colored than even kings could enjoy.
Each night, I can relax as heated water -- as much as I'd like -- is continuously poured over me. The temperature can be increased exactly to taste with a flick of my fingers.
I can speak with my friends at any time, no matter where in the world they are, and much more quickly than by sending out a horse and rider.
I cannot smell the people that I live with, and they don't need to cover up their own stench with perfume, as would have happened a few hundred years ago. Our clothes are washed with almost no effort.
Our water is drawn and heated for us. Our bread is toasted to taste for us. We can get many varieties of hot food within a few minutes (thanks to the microwave) of the moment we think of it. We can obtain exotic spices of almost any sort. Our dishes are washed for us. Our rugs are beaten for us (thank you, vacuum cleaner). Cold foods are kept easily available to hand. If I want hot chocolate, instead of pumping water, lighting a fire, putting the water over the fire, waiting half an hour,
May we never see th
What with the last go around with Powell and his support of a very one sided royalty system for internet radio, I was seriously thinking the guy was like darth Vader or something.
but this, this thing, this VOIP SIP phone not needing regulation and therefore added expense and licensing and anal probing and government placating and and well..
It's just wonderful!
Now for all those who say "But where will the telcos pay for the landlines" I say, they should roll in the SIP themselves and offer it as part of their DSL/Broadband package. Charge and extra $30 a month for it and overcharge 500% on the eqpt as usual with a mandatory fee of $250.00 for sending over a dude dressed like a gas station attendent who will plug it in and turn it on, plus cram in 120 or so extra fees and excise taxes. And that my friend is where SBC and the like will compensate for long distance.
"If you take a look at VoIP, it promises to eliminate revenue altogether"
No, it promises to eliminate waste.
Consider these five questions:
- What else could people and businesses spend the money on, that they used to waste on phone bills?
- What totally new things could people and businesses do with infinite free phone time, that they could not have done when phones cost money?
- What new businesses could start, because the lowered cost margins suddenly make their plans profit-viable?
- What new businesses could start, because the tech is functionally better, and opens up opporunities that were impossible before?
- What new innovation could now happen in the arena of phones and phone-like technologies, that was previously impossible, because the technology was expensive to own and inaccessible to learn?
That new innovation will improve efficiency yet again, and the cycle goes around.
I've posted this before, when the topic came up on another occasion, but it's worth repeating.
The FCC is NOT going to regulate computer-to-computer "phone" calls. If you run voice over your Internet connection, as an application, it's your business, and that's that. Even the guy who drafted the infamous ACTA petition in 1996 now thinks VoIP is cool stuff.
The problem is the phone call between the consumer with a plain old phone line and the VoIP network. "Phone to phone" and "phone to computer" calls have a telco leg that's just a plain old voice call. Under current law, a phone call can be either "telephone exchange service" or "exchange access service". The former is basically taken to mean a local call, though the legal definition is a bit more expansive. The latter is taken to be the local phone company's leg of a toll call (what AT&T or MCI buys). Guess which one costs more.
Now if all VoIP calls were treated as local ("telephone exchange service"), then the local telephone companies (think: Bells) would lose money that they now make from exchange access service ("switched access"). And the rural phone companies, who charge the long distance companies MUCH more than the Bells for that service, in order to compensate for higher costs (that is, to subsidize local service to the sticks), are very protective of switched access revenues. And the flyover states each have two senators.
So the main issue will come up around the far end of a Vonage call, for instance -- if Vonage is a long-distance company, they will have to pay access when they deliver a long distance call. Just like other long distance companies. Skype's on-net calls, and FWD, won't be touched as long as they are on net. Count on it.
Ideally, the whole access thing would go away, and the distinction between access and local would be moot. That's the way it works in msot of Europe, I think -- it's an American tradition to classify things to death, and let the lawyers litigate like crazy over the classification. How many billable lawyer hours do you think this case will be worth in Washington?
Perhaps the governemt should fill this role. Like they maintain the highway infrastructure.
Not a good example. You don't have the right to drive a car on the highway. It is a privelage. You must agree to stop and identify yourself when directed to by law enforcment. You must agree to pay special fees between two points when directed to do so.
A government controlled infrastructure that displaces the telco industry would probably make things simpler for the FBI, no more problems with untappable technology. For those thinking I will encrypt look again at the physical highways where you are required to identify yourself. Also what is there to stop the government from dropping encrypted connections? Free speech, privacy, no, again look at the highway system, a privelage not a right.
Personally I'm not worried about the above but I'm sure many around here who were jumping on the highway analogy were not thinking about it very much. My personal concern is that I doubt that whatever infrastructure the government comes up with will cost less than what the telcos would have cost. If the day comes where I no longer have to give AT&T money I expect that I will be giving an even larger amount to my ISP and/or government internet utility.
How does this make telcos obsolete? The telcos are the ones that operate the entire backbone of the internet, as well as most of the last mile connections. They won't loose any jobs. They may loose money as people switch to VoIP, but that will simply mean that the price of data lines will go up to compensate for the dual role that they are playing.
On the point of OSS, it has created jobs, as well as replacing them. Furthermore, I hate to say this but we what we consider "normal" for the shrink-wrapped software industry, was really a boom, and it's getting ready to bust. By and large, the only reason people buy new versions of software is because they need to stay compatible with everyone else. The rest of the industry has dropped in prices in time, while software if anything has risen. Shrinkwrapped software is an industry waiting to be obsoleted. Lastly, the vast majority of software jobs are custom in-house or consulting work, and those jobs don't have anything to loose from OSS - in fact they are the very types of jobs which OSS is creating.
Technology is simply change. Throughout history, people have always been afraid of fact that technology will not provide the jobs it replaces, and they have always been proven wrong. There is nothing about these two particular advances which suggests that it will be any different.
Saying they're "under the gun" implies that they were dragged their by a hostile FCC. This is largely Pulver trying to get the territory nailed down in a relatively friendly centralized manner, largely to block the kinds of problems that are happening in some states where the Public Utilities Commission has discovered that someone is doing something useful and profitable without their regulatory "help".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So, your ISP bill will go up when they force you to pay the universal access charges that currently get tacked onto your phone bill.
Clear, Dark Skies
1. Why do we want to use a number to contact a specific phone instead of alphanumerics to contact a person like an email address? When we use a phone, are we trying to contact another phone, or a person? Unless it's a business line, isn't it usually a specific person we're trying to reach?
2. How long until we start getting VoIP spam?