[MLB-WIRELESS] Free World Dialup moves to $30 registration

[Tyson Clugg]

On Fri, 2008-08-15 at 07:33 +1000, Bryan Pliatsios wrote:
> Years ago I was crawling the MW wiki and can across a list of FWD users: 
> http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/wiki/?FWDnumbers
...
> I was still on the mailing list (until today) and it feels like for the 
> last 3 years FWD has been flailing around trying to find a way to 
> commercialise or find funding.
> 
> -Why did everybody choose FWD?
Because it works and it (was) free.  Being able to dial a short
extension to call a mate was great, using a real phone handset (not
headphone + boom mic) made the experience enjoyable.

> -Will you remain and pay the fee?
Certainly not.  There are other free services including Freshtel
(www.freshtel.net) who are based here in Melbourne.  They have a
software phone called Firefly (www.freshtel.net/firefly) which I've used
previously.

I'm avoiding Skype because I don't like P2P bandwidth metrics, and
because they've turned an open concept into a proprietary product.

There are technologies which may be useful for Melbourne Wireless users
such as:

ENUM
----
In short, a server with ENUM support will lookup a dialled telephone
number in DNS to see if there's alternate ways to set up the call
instead of just calling out on the PSTN telephone line. ENUM may contain
a reference to a SIP URL, a telephone number to dial, a web page or an
e-mail address.
( from http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-ENUM )

DUNDi
-----
DUNDi™ is a peer to peer system for locating Internet gateways to
telephony services. Unlike traditional centralized services (such as the
remarkably simple and concise ENUM standard), DUNDi is fully distributed
with no centralized authority whatsoever.
( from http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+DUNDi+Call+Routing )

Cheers,
Tyson.