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

If you want to join...

[ArbiterOne]

Apparently it's free... but the site was down when I arrived. The main site can be confusing, but the FWD site is: http://www.fwd.pulver.com.

Why VOIP is not a communication thing

[moduc]

I love VOIP. Also, having free call over the world is great. However, I just cannot understand why VOIP is not a communication medium, and why the FCC has to decide whether to impose rule on it or not. It's is another way to transfer voice right? So, it does not work like a phone, but it does what a phone does - providing a mechanism for 2 people or more talking to each other. Maybe it should not be regulated because if doing so would slow the adoption of this technolog. But to decide whether it's like a telephone or not, to be fair, I think it's just like telephone or TV, no difference.

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

[mikewas]

But the traditional voice circuits are carried over copper or glass, no electromagnetic spectrum required there. Satelite & RF links are rarely used for circuit switched voice anymore, the quality of service over copper wire or glass fiber is better & the high capacity makes costs low. Does that mean my landline phone is not a communications thing? VoIP is also most certainly a commnication thing, but part of the FCC's charter is to encourage communications technology for the common good. There are financial implications, and they are intentionally "unfair". What we have now, at least in the US, is a very uneven playing field. There are different catagories of companies that provide phone service (they are vying for the same consumer dollars) but are treated differently:

The incumbent landline company is still regulated even though they no longer have the advantage of being a monopoly.

Non-incumbent landline companies are much less regulated.

Mobile providers are taxed at a lower rate and are required to supply fewer emergency services (though this is changing).

VoIP is almost completely unregulated and untaxed. Provides almost no emergency services other than passing the user to the PSTN network.

VoIP suppliers, and to a lesser extent the non-incumbent landline providers & the mobile service providors, are riding on the coattails of the incumbent landline service providors. They get cheap facilities & services, are held to a lower requirements of service, and are taxed at a lower rate.

The incumbent is required to lease facilities to competitors at a rate based on the cost of those facilities. Then, when the incumbent needs additional facilities (because it was required to give them to its competitors) they must build new facilities at a higher cost. This puts them at a huge competitive disadvantage, eventhough there are charges applied to other providors that are funnelled to the incumbent (to offset the cost of providing service to everyone, emergency services, inexpensive/free service to schools, libraries & the poor, a higher quality of service. So there are huge financial implications and they are arificially skewed.

There is reason to favor the new technology, or at least there was. It makes it easier for new services & technologies to develop. However, in my opinion, it's time for VoIP to pay its own way. The technology is there, it has been around for quite some time now. It already makes tremendous sense in some areas e.g. a campus or company with excess data transmission capacity can make use of the spare bandwidth for voice. The hotel I'm in has integrated data & voice facilities, since many travellers to business hotels now require high speed network connections this scheme works well. It's even beginning to make sense to replace traditional switched circuit facilities -- I visit many Central Offices that belong to different telephone companies (wireline & wireless). Almost every CO I've been in recently has VoIP. They aren't tearing out their traditional switches but most have passed the trial stage and are using VoIP for growth now. Expect changes, VoIP will be expected to hold its own soon.

Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

So I've they'd ruled against them would the headline have been "FCC Sucks On Pulver Free World Dialup"? :)

This won't last.

[bryanp]

1) The big Telco's start revamping their systems so that they are giant VOIP systems.
2) Tax revenues plummet.
3) Congress says "I don't think so."
4) Tax laws are amended.
5) Tax revenues go back up (Govt. version of Profit!)

No, no ??? line in this one. It's too obvious.

Re:This won't last.

[Roofus]

Oooh! I can play! This time I'll be the Cable Operators.

1) Cable COs see that VOIP competition is eating away at a new market they want to be a major player in.

2) Said Cable COs roll out DOCSIS 2.0 wih Quality of Service (QoS) provisions.

3) Cable COs give their VOIP packets highest priority, and everybody else low priority.

4) Customer calls to complain that their 3rd party VOIP is choppy. Customer service says "We can switch you over to our jitter-free service for only $5 more per month!"

5) VOIP competition dies.

Of course...

[mgcsinc]

Of course, this doesn't prevent congress from creating a bill that does apply to such services...

SIPphone

[Swe3tDave]

i got a free SIPphone software with my LindowsOS, you have to know someone who his also connected to the SIP network for this to work.. So its useless for me anyway..

Re:SIPphone

[LostCluster]

No, this is exactly what Free World Dialup is all about. You get a number assigned to you by Pulver, and that's associated with your SIP connection information. You can then sign up with one of several VoIP-to-PTSN connection companies, and suddenly you have a 10-digit dialable number that leads to your SIP software.

Of course, you'll have to pay for the VoIP-to-PTSN connect, and that's the service the FCC will regulate, Pulver's number assignment process however is not something that the FCC is going to complain about.

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.

Re:Sounds cool, just installed Kphone now what?

[tjansen]

1. Note that kphone is more a research project that end-user friendly software. It became much better in the last year though.
2. The user part is your number, e.g. "17556" (my number). The host part is "fwd.pulver.com". The outbound proxy is "fwdnat.pulver.com:5082" and the authentication username is "17556". If you are on a NAT, you should go to 'SIP Preferences'/'Socket' and set 'Stun server' to yes.
3. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol.

Re:Dupe

[Dun Malg]

No, it's not a dupe. Let me quote from the story you link:

"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.'"

Notice the future tense. The FCC hadn't ruled yet. They were going to make a decision. This story is abut the decision they made. Whether the ruling was a foregone conclusion is debatable, but that doesn't make it a dupe. Get a clue.

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.

There is a negative side too

[fpn]

Not that I like the large telcos or excessive regulations, but 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:

- Free access and services for the disabled, e.g. speech to text translators for the deaf/mute and hearing/speech impaired as well as mute people. (You call a 1-800 number and a person types what you say into a TTY and tells you what the other person wrote and vice-versa)

- Cheaper rates for the poor

- 911 location service - e.g. you have a stroke at your home and call 911 and can't speak, they can still locate you

and there are quite a few more.

best regards,
Florian