Pulver's free spirit

The gadfly is at it again. Jeff Pulver, president and CEO of pulver.com, went live with his third rendition of Free World Dialup in November. It is a service for broadband users who want to make free phone calls across the Internet using cable, DSL, Ethernet or satellite. He took time out from promoting a new industry conference called Supernova to discuss his compulsion to promote free Internet telephony. For the record, Supernova explores the concept of decentralization of communications networks and takes place next week in Palo Alto, Calif. It may be worth watching.

What's new in rendition three of Free World Dialup?

It's all G711 (standard for pulse code modulation), so the quality is amazing. It's somewhere between "better than cellular" and "almost as good as being there." I get calls from people in Spain, Israel and Mexico, and they are surprised how good is sounds. Being on broadband, and not being dependent on the PSTN, we have complete freedom to operate unregulated. It's like following the e-mail model where there is no such thing as distance or duration or size. You don't pay any more money sending an e-mail from New York to Chicago than from New York to Tokyo, or whether it's three sentences or 25 megabytes. FWD is the same way. Today, as long as you have broadband and a compliant SIP phone, anyone can be in the game.

How are people finding out about FWD?

Google mostly. We don't advertise, and there has been no press. People are discovering it through search engines and spreading it word of mouth. We have doubled our user base in two and a half weeks and have about 2450 users. People will soon realize that always-on isn't enough if all they are going to do is Web surf. This will be another reason people will pay for broadband. I know a guy who is giving his relatives all over the country Cisco SIP phones for Christmas so they can use FWD to talk to each other.

How many users before an ILEC takes notice?

Give me a million users, and then we'll worry about it. We are just a small piece of the puzzle as far as their revenue loss, but I don't think there is anything the RBOCs can do to stop someone from using an IP phone on the Internet. There is no E-911 issue, and we aren't interconnecting to the PSTN or any other network. It's just pure IP. And we're not giving away any [phone] numbers. I made up my own dial plan.

How do you recover your costs?

Maybe I can capitalize on it, maybe I can't, but I'm doing it anyway. I'm making an investment in the future and doubling down on this because I think if you follow what you believe, good stuff will happen. The service is free, but if I had critical mass and someone wanted voice mail or five-way calling or some other value-added service, I could offer it. Or who knows, I have to believe if I got to 100,000 users a major service provider would have to say, "OK, how much do you want?" Then I could follow the ICQ model.