FCC Rules On Pulver Free World Dialup

An anonymous reader writes " Light Reading is reporting that the verdict is in on Pulver's FWD. 'The first big decision was a victory for VoIP proponents. The commission ruled that Pulver.com's Free World Dialup VOIP service is an information service, not a telecommunications service. The decision was based largely on the analysis that it doesn't fit the 1996 Telecom Act's definition of a telecommunications service.' To me this was a no-brainer on the part of the FCC. Let's see if they get the rest right too."

Comments

Re:Why VOIP is not a communication thing

[oldave]

Telephone companies have been regulated because they have traditionally been monopolies.

The main reason is that it simply makes no sense financially for another company to hang wires to the same houses.

VOIP doesn't have the same financial implications, and will introduce competition, particularly in the long distance markets.

Television (broadcast - cable and satellite are different animals), on the other hand, uses a finite resource - electromagnetic spectrum. Channel assignments are regulated, which makes sense. I've never been comfortable with content regulation, but that's a discussion for other threads.

Re:Why VOIP is not a communication thing

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think it's just like telephone or TV, no difference."

The difference being it's a directory service, and doesn't handle VoIP

Re:This won't last.

[Anonymous Coward]

But what infrastructure will their "giant VOIP systems" work on? That'll still be telecommunications.

Re:SIPphone

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you have to join the SIP network, but there are ways to stage dial into the POTS network too.

The freebie software phone apps, while they do work reasonably well, require a sound card, speakers, mike, or a headset/mic....and some tuning. This seems to turn a lot of people off to the whole thing after fiddling with it for a while.

Or you can throw down as little as $65 for a real IP phone and just plug it in. That's not a lot of money, and well worth it IMHO, since you don't need to leave a PC running, it just seems more natural, and it just works.

The Day I became an Object Noun

[jeffpulver]

Looking back, this has been one of the best weeks in my life, at least from the perspective of my life experiences in business.

During the FCC February 2004 Meeting, while agenda item #4, the FWD Petition was being granted, I gave up counting how many times the name "Pulver" was mentioned in the proceeding.

After thinking about this, I believe we witnessed the transition where my name became an object noun which will be associated with the petition that I filed on behalf of Free World Dialup on February 5, 2003.

A little bit of background here

[Anonymous Coward]

This ruling was awaited, but it is the easiest in the long VoIP cases yet to be judged. FWD is just a signaling/directory service, from what I understand.

Now consider Vonage which sells phone service on top of broadband, yet is not registered as a telephone service provider. Or AT&T who claims that its VoIP phone-to-phone services are not subject to the same regulation than other phone-to-phone services.

The key issue yet remaining to be assessed is the question of access charges. These are the cost billed by a local carrier to a long distance carrier, which is much higher than the cost of the very same local leg leased to, say, an individual or a business.

AT&T, preceded in this regard by many other smaller long-distance carriers are using local business lines to deliver regular phone-to-phone calls on the local market, in order to go around access charges. AT&T claims that because it uses the Internet to carry the calls, they are VoIP and should be free of access charge. Obviously local carriers don't really see it this way...

My guess is that the FCC wanted to look pro-Internet in this big VoIP debate, so it is ruling now on FWD before they have an opportunity to look at the Vonage ("PC/phone") and AT&T ("phone/phone") cases. These two are much trickier to regulate and their implications, whatever the outcome may be, will be far-reaching.

Re:Why VOIP is not a communication thing

[Charcharodon]

The VOIP that the FCC ruled on is not as you portray it. Free World is simply an organization that helps hand out numbers for voip so people can conviently connect to one another only over VOIP. They offer no service what's so ever that allows you to connect to tranditional phone networks. (Though they do encourge people with VOIP/standard phone systems to let others connect through them for free.) If they did, then they would have to maintain connections to the phone network and money would have to change hands in order for this to work. Pure VOIP already pays it's own way. To talk to my parents in the midwest or my buddy who is stationed in Korea, we all have to pay for broad band, there is no free ride for the VOIP! My buddy does have a second funtion that he pays for so he can call his family in Washington to their standard phone line and they to him, making it a local call. Again not free.

Even the hotels and businesses you mentioned still must pay for some sort of connection to the outside world for local calls (non-VOIP).

Re:There is a negative side too

[Just Some Guy]

[...] there are many good social services that regular telephone companies are legally required to provide at their expense that these new VoIP companies will not have to provide:

Except for maybe the 911 locator, those are good things not to be forced to provide. It's just plain wrong for me to have to pay extra on my line so that someone meeting an arbitrary set of conditions gets either 1) cheaper service or 2) extra services. If you can't pay for a luxury service (and telephone is a luxury, regardless of what anyone tells you), then don't get it. If you want to use extra services, like text relaying, expect to pay for them.

From another perspective, if the company that you personally started, built up, and ran received a government mandate to start providing free stuff to certain customers, how would you feel?

Re:There is a negative side too (Reality Check!)

[Crypto Gnome]

- Cheaper rates for the poor

Come on people. They're POOR, but you expect them to have

1. a phoneline (which MY phone costs are already higher so as to help pay for this)
2. a computer
3. internet access

and NOW you want me so pay extra (ie extra AGAIN) so that they can use The Internet for phone calls instead of using the land-line I've already paid extra for them to have?

I can accept the argument that "the internet" is rapidly becoming such a pervasive part of modern western society that lack of accessibility to "the poor" and "the less-abled" is an unfortunate situation we should all work to minimize. But to argue that we as a community should also fork out our own hard-earned cash so that other people can have access to premium/luxury services is nothing more than rampant bleeding-heart stupidity.

Let me say it again, clearly, for those of you who're thick-as-a-brick

1. telephone service is near-enough to a basic necessity that I don't care to whine
2. Internet is getting there (and at least could be argued as such)
3. Voice Over IP services are a luxury
   ie they're cool and leet but they provide essentially nothing (certainly nothing that's absolutely essential) that Ye-Olde-Tele-o-Phone doesn't provide

Or let me say this another way - if we (the not-poor or otherwise disadvantaged) are going to pay extra so that Jimmy-Welfare can have affordable (phone+computer+internet+) VoIP, then I'd expect Billy G and suchlike people have all contributed part of their income so that I can be driven to work in a Stretch Limo.

Turn your brain on before you post next time.