A weekly series by UPI examining emerging wireless telecommunications technologies and markets.
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CHICAGO, May 28 (UPI) -- Jeff Pulver is an energetic evangelist for Internet telephony, and he's leading a dynamic movement of free-phone-call enthusiasts all around the globe.
The entrepreneur took his message to Washington, D.C., this spring and persuaded the Federal Communications Commission to leave certain peer-to-peer Internet phone calls unregulated.
Last week, he was in Canada, preaching much the same message about wireless fidelity and broadband telephony to lawmakers in the capital of Ottawa.
Pulver's legislative and technological trail -- he also is one of the founders of the broadband company Vonage -- is unexpectedly setting the rules for communications in the 21st century, and his trailblazing work recently moved an aide to Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, to introduce Pulver as the "Rosa Parks" of Internet telephony during a public forum.
That allusion is to the woman who, at the instigation of Rev. Martin Luther King, engaged in a peaceful protest against discriminatory laws -- taking a seat in the "Whites Only" section of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. -- which ultimately generated publicity to fuel the civil rights movement.
"That's a good way to put it," said John Grass, director of engineering at Network Equipment Technologies Inc., in Fremont, Calif., agreeing with the description of Pulver's role.
"The biggest impact is the publicity of the ruling," he told United Press International. "It makes people aware."
A leading telecommunications lawyer, Dana Frix, with the Washington, D.C., office of the New York law firm, Chadbourne & Park, told UPI the FCC's Pulver decision may "very well may have long term impact" on the future of telecommunications in the United States.
The Pulver petition began a little over a year ago, in February 2003. A technology entrepreneur, Pulver created a new offering, Free World Dialup, to allow users of broadband Internet services to make telephone calls, for free, to others who installed FWD software, using WiFi phones, or other consumer devices.
The offering today has some 200,000 users around the globe, Pulver told UPI.
"I wanted to assert that if a communication starts on an Internet network and doesn't touch a conventional phone network, it should not be regulated," he said. "So I filed the petition."
After a lot of lobbying by established phone companies against the proposal, the FCC on Feb. 12 announced it agreed with Pulver.
"We declare that FWD is neither 'telecommunications' nor 'telecommunications service,'" said the FCC's 29-page opinion. "Moreover, we declare that FWD is an unregulated information service, subject to federal jurisdiction."
To the casual reader, this might appear to be legal gobbledygook. But the ruling was exceptionally controversial within the telecommunications community and within the Internet and broadband industries, too, Fritz Messere, a professor and chairman of communications studies at the State University of New York at Oswego, told UPI.
The reason is simple.
"What this ruling does is allow broadband service providers an opportunity to experiment outside of the system ... without the fear of regulation," said Messere, author of the new book, "Broadcast, Cable, The Internet, and Beyond" (McGraw Hill, 2004).
The FCC went even further in announcing its decision, stating, "(Internet Protocol)-enabled services, such as Pulver's FWD, and other Internet applications like it, promise significant benefits in the form of lower prices, and enhanced functionality, for American consumers."
Moreover, the FCC stated, "these IP-enabled services will encourage more consumers to demand broadband service."
The decision demonstrated some unusual prescience on the part of the government regulators -- who worked on the petition for about a year.
Right around the time of the announcement of the ruling, other companies were debuting new offerings, services similar to Free World Dialup.
The entrepreneurs were based all over the world, and included the founders of Kazaa, the free music-swapping Web site, and others who were active during the dot-com era.
"We invented a product called Glophone," said Edward Cespedes, president of Voiceglo, a technology start-up in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
"We think this is a category killer," he told UPI. "We call it the fastest way to get a United States telephone number. If you're sitting in an apartment in Moscow, you can go on the Internet, download our software, and sign up for a working New York City phone number, with a 212 area code."
The service relies completely on the Internet, and allows customers to place calls for free to anyone else using the service.
"My mother uses this to talk to my grandmother in Peru," Cespedes said. "She no longer has a $250 per month long-distance bill."
Once WiFi phones -- such as those being developed by Motorola, Nokia and Taiwanese companies -- become widely available, technology marketers expect the trend will pick up a lot of momentum.
Major telecom companies such as AT&T also are moving forward with plans to compete against these WiFi and Internet telephone start-ups.
The greatest impact of the Pulver decision, Frix said, is its rebound effect.
"Other companies are arguing now as to what it really means," he said. "Eventually, more rules will come out ... but it is clear that the FCC concluded that (Voice Over Internet Protocol) should be let alone so the possibilities of that technology could flourish."
Despite his emerging fame in the technology world, Pulver said the impact of the ruling on his petition will only really be known years from now.
"Five years from now, this becomes very significant, when all voice traffic moves on to broadband networks," said Pulver, who worked years ago as the "IT guy" on Wall Street for Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost so many employees in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Pulver, today president of Pulver.com, thinks the most important aspect of the ruling is the FCC has taken jurisdiction over WiFi and Internet telephony and not left it to the states. He is not so sure, however, that regulators in other markets, such as Canada, will see things the same way.
A week ago, Pulver told telecom regulators at the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission that society was "sitting on the threshold of another revolution, comparable to the emergence of the Internet and e-mail in the 1990s."
They appear to be heading in another direction there, however, one that may embrace regulation of Internet telephony and WiFi.
"It's an odyssey ... meeting with regulators and government officials," Pulver said.
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Gene Koprowski covers telecommunications technologies for UPI Science News. E-mail [email protected]
