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February 05, 2005
BellsterfwdOUT: After Two Weeks - Still Misunderstood and Growing...
BellsterfwdOUT (as in Free World DialOUT) is in the process of helping to build a series of 'community' bridges between end-to-end IP networks and 'public' networks, which include both PSTN and cellular.
fwdOUT is a 'social communications' experiment and so far the two week results have been quite encouraging.
There are some people in the blogsphere who don't understand the drivers of fwdOUT (they never asked me directly) but yet they feel a need to blog a comment on what they think is going on, even if they are not in the know of what is really happening. This aspect of the blogsphere continues to be a source of my own personal amusement. :-)
So, for the record, fwdOUT is a free, non-commercial directory service that does offer access to a global, personal, 'phone-patch' like network, where the community of people offering the service all have access to the same. In some ways we are treating internet access providers as providers of just 'dumb pipes' and we are helping to connect people with people via our directory service.
We believe in 'disruptive communications' and the evolution of 'end-to-end' IP and are looking at ways to leverage these phenomena in ways which have not happened yet.
At the moment there are some fwdOUT nodes currently servicing hundreds/thousand(s) of local users. (think Universities). So while we have "only" 107 connected nodes on-line at the moment, the number of people being served by these nodes are already in the thousands (and possibility tens of thousands) range.
As the number of fwdOUT nodes continue to grow, the fwdOUT Network starts to become able to deliver much more in terms of absolute communication possibilities. We are in the process of building a parallel platform for future communication experimentation.
fwdOUT is not a US focused project but rather an international one. The majority of routes available right now are to non-US destinations. The majority of active fwdOUT nodes are non-US nodes connecting with other non-US nodes. This isn't about "toll by-pass." This is about connecting end-points with end-points.
The people from around the world who have been signing up to run a fwdOUT node are in sync with our balanced approached to sharing local, personal communication platforms.
Our developer team has been working on reducing the barriers to entry for new fwdOUT nodes to get online and I expect to have news about this prior to Spring 2005 VON in San Jose.
fwdOUT: Two weeks old and two weeks strong!
Posted by jeff on February 5, 2005 07:37 AM | Permalink
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