Jeff Pulver is president and CEO of pulver.com, as well as one of the forefathers of the VoIP industry. He co-founded Vonage, founded Free World Dial-Up, and is also very involved in trying to shape Washington policy. We had a chat with Jeff this week to try and gain insight on some of the latest issues facing VoIP.

BBR: Cable now accounts for roughly 52% of VoIP connections, with Comcast, the nation's largest provider, only just starting to market their own service (via Walmart, no less). After earnings reports this week, that number climbed even higher. Do you see a VoIP future dominated by the MSO's?

JP: What is clear is that the MSO market will be a strong market for VoIP vendors to sell into. VoIP will be one of the core services sold by MSOs for the foreseeable future. But since the CableCos are selling Voice as a "service" and not as an "application" they are still missing the larger opportunity. I'm still waiting for the CableCos to move toward offering nomadic VoIP services and offer their customers a softclient to be used so that they can answer phone calls when they are outside of their home, be it in a WiFi hotspot or otherwise connected in the broadband world.

BBR: Comcast recently claimed they don't really compete with indie VoIP providers. (see our report here) Are their claims justified?

JP: If these are "indie" providers who are selling voice as an application and not as a service, I would agree. But my hope is that over time this changes and Comcast starts to leverage the true power of what IP Communications offers and decides to focus on delivering something other than a replacement wireline service that is powered by VoIP.

BBR: Net Neutrality laws saw an early defeat this week in the House. Do you believe we'll ever see effective laws preventing incumbents from blocking or degrading competing voice or video services?

JP: I would like to believe so but it is very hard to predict what happens in Washington, D.C. I fully expect for "Net Neutrality" to become a platform issue for some of the people running for re-election in November. But I am not sure this is the year this will happen. But I do believe that the FTC could get involved and will protect the rights of consumers.

BBR: There was a lot of noise last week as more partisan outfits like MoveOn, and several free-market firms littered the web with press releases. Do you believe that net-neutrality is a partisan issue?

JP: It really depends upon how people are defining net neutrality. It could be a partisan issue in a non-partisan world.

BBR: Elsewhere, companies like Narus are creating a market for themselves in blocking Skype from certain incumbent networks. While they've been working for Shanghai Telecom in China, do you see a Skype-blocking surge in the States?

JP: A surge in the States? no. but being used by otherwise disrupted companies trying to protect their turf? Yes. What is happening is that some hotel ISPs are blocking VoIP traffic around the world and around the USA. I've also seen some issues in public hotspots and in some Starbucks. But in these cases it might be their poor attempt to perform policy based ad-hoc network management.

BBR It will be curious to see what happens when airline VoIP & broadband take-off - So far, it appears like the incumbents aren't pushing VoIP that hard, as they milk the revenue from their slowly dying landline business. When do you foresee the incumbent telcos beginning to truly push VoIP services hard, and where does this leave independent VoIP providers?

JP: Incumbents like BT and Bell Canada talk about an all IP future. So I have to believe that they are doing everything today to make that happen. Others with a vested interest in their legacy equipment have less reasons to rush forward. But in the end, it is clear that VoIP technology will be used by all carriers, until such time that a new and better technology becomes available and in effect disrupts the existing VoIP ecosystem.

BBR: FCC & 911: After their see-sawing earlier this year on the issue, do you believe the FCC is effectively tackling the 911/VoIP issue? Do you agree with some critics who suggest they're using 911 policy, largely at the behest of incumbents, to help eliminate independent competition?

JP: Please take a look at some of my longer blog posts about VoIP and E911 ( see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 -Ed.) I don't have any short answers here about the topic but I would like to believe that the critics in the end are wrong.

BBR: Can you offer any advice to users contemplating which VoIP service they should select?

JP: None other than they should be finding a service that best matches to their needs. My preference is to find service providers who are actively engaged in leveraging IP based platforms to deliver voice as an application rather than a service. But that's just me. I'm sure many others will be very comfortable finding a company who offers a replacement to POTS service.

BBR: I know you're involved in a long list or projects. What have you been focusing on lately? What's the latest with Free World Dial-Up?

Reply: During the 30 days my focus has included: staying focused while on the road. I've been away a lot. Enjoyed being at my friend's "Geek Camp" in Israel. While I was in Tel Aviv I met with 17 start-ups and number of of them showed real promise to become players in the IP Communication space.

- Blogging. this is part of my daily on-line life.

- Video. Working on the launch of pulver.TV and the completion of the Internet TV studio that is located at my office on Long Island. I have a lot of ideas in the Video space.

- Our Save the Net Contest

- The Pulver/Evslin Petition to the FCC on Post-Disaster Communications.

- Focusing on the launch of our "Video on the Net" event in September that will be co-located with VON in Boston and inviting the speakers to the event. Also on the conference side, dealing with our worldwide events on the pulvermedia schedule. In a couple of weeks I will be in Sweden for our VON Europe Spring event and I have been looking forward to my return to Stockholm since I left last May.

- FeedCollectors which is my own "Web 2.0" project. This is the engine that powers pulverati.

- Vivox and Tello: I'm on the board of both companies and I'm an active and engaged board member. Both of these companies have their roots within pulver.com.

- Hollywood. A couple of weeks ago an interview of mine was published in the LA Times and since that Q&A article ran, I've been in contact with a couple of indepdent Hollywood studios who share my vision for the future of the TV/Film/Broadcasting industry.

- IPeerX: a company that was also born inside pulver.com and a company that is playing a role in the VoIP Peering space.

I'm sure I forgot some of other things that I've touched...

BBR: Heading back to crystal-ball gazing, do you agree with individuals like Rupert Murdoch who predict that voice will someday be completely free? If so, doesn't that disrupt the idea of the broadband bundle as the primary incumbent dream?

JP: I believe it was John Chambers who first said Voice would be free until someone from an ILEC called him and asked "and will all your routers also be free?" Meg from eBay said something similar too. So let's say that "Voice is free" -- what that doesn't mean is that people will be paying nothing to speak to each other. Especially if there are value-added services applied in the mix.

But dreams sometimes become nightmares and nightmares are some people's dreams and someplace in between is the way the future will play out. In the end if all anyone does is deliver a service that smells just like the service it was replacing and doesn't advance the state of communications we all lose.

BBR: How can you compete with massive marketing departments and industry lobbyists when it comes to shaping fair, somewhat consumer friendly technology legislation? How can our users help?

JP: Sometimes an independent voice can be heard from outside the crowd. Other times it is real important for people to work together to get noticed. My hope is that if we can leverage the creative forces available on the internet at large that we can find a way to be seen and get heard.

My hope is that we can get our ads get seen by the DC crowd. First we need to get people to share their creative energies. Any and all help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.