In my last post, I had raised the possibility that one application of fwdOUT may not be permissible in US as well, not just Singapore and India. That application is patching a VoIP call on to PSTN. At that time I did not have definitive reference and indicated that since pulver.com has legal counsel, we could assume that there shouldn’t be a problem. Still, I posted this question to one of Pulver’s entries in his blog. Seemingly as a response to this, Pulver posted a link to a story in a Long Island paper that quotes Isenberg saying that to his knowledge there are no legal barriers to the use of BellsterfwdOUT. Now Daniel Ryan weighs in by quoting a tariff from Qwest to suggest that such patching may not be allowed. The LI paper quotes Isenberg as saying "The law of unintended consequences looms large." Indeed.
In another entry, Pulver gives a hint of another perfectly acceptable use: interconnecting large enterprises (he asks us to “think Universities”). Now many enterprises have interconnected their PBXs distributed over multiple locations using private lines. VoIP eases such interconnections even when the traffic is not sufficient to warrant deploying private lines. SIPPhone had introduced this capability sometime during August/September of last year and for the same purpose. Most of the concerns raised in the blogosphere do not apply to this application: enterprises can easily afford “1 day, 1K, 1 person” to set the system up; since they are interconnecting private networks, no concern about legal matters. But then for this application there is no need for credit management that fwdOUT provides. For that matter there is no need for intermediation from SIPPhone or fwdOUT.
Posted by aswath at February 6, 2005 08:39 AM