Free World Dialup Is No Longer Free
According to various reports after over a decade Free World Dialup is moving to a paid service model. I can’t help but feel that something is being lost in this transition. I’ve had a FWD account for years (54245) but rarely ever used it beyond testing Asterisk servers. I does ring through to my desk phone, passed over IAX2 to my Astlinux box. Someone said that the IAX2 access has been down recently, but I haven’t noticed.
I once spoke to a guy down in Argentina who just happened to answer the intro line. I also left Jeff Pulver a voice message once. His number was really cool and low, like 1001 if I recall. Mostly I just called their echo test to verify connectivity.
FWD was fun. It was truly HAM radio on the internet. It was part of what drew me into VOIP.