Pulver Upping The Ante On Free World Dialup

from the take-that-SIPPhone dept

Well, that was fast. Yesterday, Michael Robertson announced SIPPhone, an almost exact replica of Jeff Pulver's Free World Dialup. Today, Pulver is in the news, explaining some of the new things he's working on to make Free World Dialup a more useful service - including a patch to let it connect to the regular phone system. That would actually make the service seem much more useful than it is now - when you can really only talk to others on the service. Pulver positions it as being similar to instant messaging: free (ignoring cost of SIP phone), instant communications between people on the same system. However, the barrier of having a second phone on your desk that can only connect to a limited number of people isn't nearly as appealing as one that can jump onto the regular phone network. Of course, the phone companies are beginning to realize that this doesn't bode well for them, and the FBI is freaking out because they can't tap FWD calls. Now that there's increasing competition in the space, we should see things start to heat up.

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