Would people pay for Inbound SIP?
| By Alok Saboo on August 6th, 2008 |
I have been a great fan of Jeff Pulver and his company Freeworlddialup. FWD has been one of the pioneers in the VoIP movement and deserves a lot of credit for the current state of VoIP. FWD has been offering free inbound SIP calling for free since almost 12 years. But that is set to change.
I received an email this morning (from none other than Jeff Pulver himself), informing that starting August 2008 FWD would charge me $30 annually to use their free SIP calling service. To say that I was shocked would not be an understatement. While I truly believe that FWD deserves the right to monetize the huge community they have developed over the years, I am not convinced by this move for the following reasons:
- Currently FWD primarily offers inbound SIP calling facility. This service is anyways being provided for free by several VoIP service providers including Gizmoproject, TPad, etc.
- VoIP aggregators like Voxalot and MySipswitch provide a more comprehensive service for free or less than $30.
- Commercial VSPs such as SMSdiscount, Freecall, and SIPdiscount, among others provide free inbound SIP URI when you pay for their service and also provide calling credits and free calls to several countries.
- Further, given that users with ATA can configure their devices easily to receive calls directly to their ATA’s, FWD is not likely to excite many users with its paid membership.
May be FWD has some tricks up its sleeves. But since they have already sent out the emails informing users about the paid membership without any such plans that does not look like the case. In an email resonse, Dan Berninger, CEO FWD, communicated that FWD is interested in developing a non-PSTN ecosystem and not compete directly with the players listed above. While the intent is noble, the approach does not seem correct. Members would not pay $30 for charity, they should get their money’s worth. FWD should first think about providing the users a value for their money, before starting to charge them.
Your comments and suggestions can force FWD to rethink its strategy and maintain the FWD community.
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Hey Alok – You have some good resources listed here. Have you heard about Magic Jack? As corny as it sounds, it truly works, and in my opinion, is the future of commercial VoIP
@Rajat
Yeah, Majic Jack surely has a lot of promise, but is it really that revolutionary?
Alok: I found your blog entry in the comments on Jeff Pulver’s blog.
My feelings about FWD’s $30/yr charge are similar to your’s.
First, I never found FWD to be a reliable and consistent service. I was never able to get a level of support necessary to resolve those problems. Because the service was free, I didn’t care about this. As soon as a fee begins to be charged, now I do.
Second is the same thing you mentioned: Essentially that FWD’s main draw is the ability to deal with NAT (to get the inbound SIP connection). Frankly the way this is handled with SIP is problematic, at best, and maybe the Internet community needs to find a better solution. FWD does, indeed, provide a good VoIP gateway service where NAT is involved. The problem is that this doesn’t scale well. Bouncing VoIP packets off someone else’s network isn’t the way to do things – what really needs to happen is for calls to ultimately end-up point-to-point. Getting that to happen when many individuals have “home NAT routers” with one-way firewalls on cable modem connections is going to be difficult.
Finally, the directory look-up service that FWD provided was one of the more positive parts of the service itself. I was always of the opinion that everyone would eventually have a FWD number and we’d all display it proudly on our web sites and e-mail signatures. Additionally, I figured any business on the Internet (just about everyone these days) would also have a FWD number and we could call them on that rather than use the PSTN. Unfortunately, this never happened, and that actually saddens me somewhat.
The concept of a “Communication ISP” that Jeff Pulver mentioned is interesting. The big question is, “Will it scale?” I suspect that the Communication ISP concept will end up going the way of the local ISP in the USA. I also am concerned about open peering when the VoIP playing field becomes much more competitive.
The folks running freenum.org actually had some good ideas about running an open directory service. I think that may have some promise with FWD becoming a pay-for service. All that we’re really needing now is an inexpensive drop-in appliance (perhaps a small Asterisk PBX) that is configurable by the non-tech-types) and I think we’d start to see this kind of thing take-off. Directory services are cheaper to run than SIP gateway services.
Sorry for rambling a bit… In any case, I liked what you had to say and I really do hope that FWD does see some success. In many ways, they were where we all got our start.
@cpu
I cannot agree more with you, FWD is where most of us got the first taste of VoIP and which is why I am even more sad by this move. I would be really happy to shell out the dollars, but then FWD needs to justify that.
I am glad I had the chance to experience FWD. I bought the sip devices and tried many different things, and considered it a hobby. It became a dream to control what we pay to call or be called. Really it is our hope to allow technology to free us from many things, but there is time that it does’nt. VOIP started to make sense with FWD, but never made sense until Skype offered in/out going calling for a low price. When my wife could pick up the phone and call someone with out hassles. I did enjoy the work but reliability and easiness lead me down another path.
@watersprayer
For lot of us, FWD was the first thing we experienced in VoIP. As you rightly point out, usability and reliability are still not the adjectives associated with VoIP. We still associate VoIP with “cheap” calls and that should change for a wider adoption of VoIP.