Free World Dialup Pushing Free Wi-Fi Hot Spots
Jeff Pulver, CEO, pulver.com announced a campaign promoting deployment of free Wi-Fi hot spots toward making the rapidly expanding Free World Dialup (FWD) community mobile.
"The 20,000 people joining of the Free World Dialup community in the last six months can use voice enabled laptops and PDA's to access Free World Dialup when not at home," noted Jeff Pulver. "The Free World Dialup Wi-Fi Hot Spot Campaign seeks to increase the number of public locations with free access to the Internet. Charging for Wi-Fi access represents the largest barrier to deployment and usage as it creates unnecessary cost, complexity, and ease of use obstacles. The potential for customer traffic easily justifies deploying free Wi-Fi Internet access. Wi-Fi access to the Internet costs so little it can get incorporated with other overhead type expenses like electricity and background music." The FWD Wi-Fi Hot Spot Campaign will provide a free online directory listing for all free Wi-Fi enabled venues. FWD members can nominate locations they want to see become free Wi-Fi hot spots via hotspots@pulver.com. Discussion list FWD-M will host community discussion of issues relating to mobile Free World Dialup.
The FWD Team will work with vendors to reduce cost and complexity barriers to hot spot deployment, make laptops and handhelds more VoIP friendly, and encourage member usage through application development and promotions.
"Awareness and education represent the biggest obstacle to ubiquitous Wi-Fi hotspots," said Daniel Berninger, Managing Director, pulver.com and lead organizer of the campaign. "Our campaign seeks to expand the reach community based free network projects beyond cities to reach the FWD members spread out in 100 countries around the world. The FWD community can work together in support of free public Internet access not unlike the projects already active in Portland, Seattle, London, and New York.
Jeff Pulver launched Free World Dialup on November 11, 2002. FWD adds over 2000 new members per week and growth continues to accelerate. Free World Dialup members can make no cost calls between each other. Anyone with a broadband connection and an Internet Protocol (IP) telephone can take advantage of the service. FWD assigns a unique number for the user's equipment and provides the mechanism for calls between members. Free World Dialup does not use traditional telephone numbers or connect directly to the Public Switched Telephone Network.
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