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January 02, 2004

Results of FWD Holiday Promotion: 40,000 New Subscribers!

On the night of December 17th I decided to launch our year-end "holiday promotion" which ended up enabling free calling on FWD to 9 countries.

Things were going rather quietly, and our subscriber growth rate stayed constant until the Israeli media discovered our free calling promotion and somebody from Bezeq went berserk and on Israel's Channel 2 called FWD, in effect, the "Napster of Telecom." This coverage in turn created the biggest demand for FWD membership that we ever experienced since the launch of FWD in November, 2002.

The fact that there are now 232 members of the Tel-Aviv Free World Dialup Meetup comes as no surprise to me. (Many other cities averge 5 to 10 members.)

One thing that we did observe is that most of the calls placed by the Israelis who joined FWD ended up being domestic Israel phone calls.

Becoming discovered became a double-edged sword since our servers became overloaded and our virtual PSTN termination capacity (30 ports worth) was running full-throttle on a 24/7 basis and in too many cases causing the overall great quality associated with FWD calling to suffer. ;-)

Looking at our logs, we ended up adding about 40,000 new subscribers to FWD since December 17th and we completed tens of thousands of phone calls despite the hardware we were using, and I learned a lot along the way about from experience.

I am currently taking a hard look at the FWD business models and what directions to explore with FWD in 2004.

I'm open to co-marketing ideas as well as suggestions for new services to add to the FWD network.

Posted by jeff on January 2, 2004 02:52 AM | Permalink

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