Ivor Jones <ivor@thisaddressis.invalid> wrote:
> In news:0u5m94te6o6743rojph5kg8qr0dsrk20bh@4ax.com,
> mymail@hotmail.com <mymail@hotmail.com> typed, for some strange,
> unexplained reason:
> : On Thu, 7 Aug 2008 16:04:29 +0100, "Ivor Jones"
> : <ivor@thisaddressis.invalid> wrote:
> :
> : >In news:6fttvtFdc88iU1@mid.individual.net,
> : >cybuerke <cybuerke@PLMgmail.com> typed, for some strange, unexplained
> : >reason:
> : >: Thats's all folks! Jeff Pulver has just spoken. As from 1
> : >: September, it'll cost $30 per year for your account with FWD. Seems
> : >: to be per email address rather than per number of SIP accounts, so
> : >: mayhap we could all club together as member(at)utv.org.uk for one
> : >: humungous FWD sip a/c?
> : >:
> : >
> : >Link to this info please..? Nothing obvious on the FWD site.
> :
> : Info sent by email to all account holders which is where the poster
> : above got the info from .

> Funny that because I am an account holder and I haven't had this email.
> The FWD site still says it's a free service.

Ivor, I have accounts and have received the same notice, maybe
it was in your spam box? FWD is notoriously crap at updating their
website on service problems etc.. and I'm sure they're crap at updating
things such as this. Also not too reliable on keeping the freephone
gateways active and working. As someone else said "Where's the value?"?
I think it's a huge mistake and the end of the usefulness of FWD, there
are many (like relatives) who have no idea they are even using FWD,
or any notion of how "that box" their family member set up for them
works. These type of people surely are not interested in paying
$30/year for it. The fact is, FWD is just a large SIP registrar service
with no direct inbound/outbound PSTN offerings of their own, the one
major cost could be the audio proxy (which, is horrible to use, but can
be a last resort on some networks with NAT traversal problems).

I thought the commercial offerings FWD brought out were supposed
to subsidize the free offering anyway? When it comes down to it, if
they truely disconnect all non-paid users at the end of Aug I think the
user base will shrink by several orders of magnitude and diminish any
value to the service that it had. All you have to do is compute how
much you can call using $30 of credit at somewhere like voicestick.com
which actually has real inbound/outbound PSTN connectivity (and an audio
proxy). Don't forget as well that voicestick (and possibly others)
don't charge for subscriber to subscriber calls. Basically a $10
deposit gets you the same as FWD along with the number, free calls to
others on the network, and ability to PSTN outbound if you need or want
it. Of course you lose on the peering arrangements and other things
but it seems the relationships/fucntioning/usefulness of those comes and
goes at random just like the FWD freephone gateway.

Don't forget voipuser.org either, a great alternative to FWD and
in my experience MUCH more robust/reliable.