Next, Can You Hear Me Now? If Yes, Thank Jeff Pulver.

We often don’t question the breakthroughs that led to the technologies that infuse our daily lives. We simply accept their existence, like facts of nature. 

Yet today’s infrastructure didn’t simply appear. The open-source Linux operating system developed because a young engineer, Linus Torvalds, sparked a global ecosystem of developers to build the software powering thousands of servers around the world. And the Internet Protocols (IP) underlying all Internet-based communications resulted from the tinkering of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. 

And if you use Whatsapp, Skype, Google Meet, or any of the countless Internet-based applications that support voice communications (Voice Over IP, or VoIP), you can say Thank You to Jeff Pulver.

Twenty years ago last week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission passed what became known as The Pulver Order — essentially a green light for innovators who wanted to use the Internet for voice communications. That may sound like a no-brainer — aren’t voice networks and Internet infrastructure today all part of the same interconnected systems? — but two decades ago it was by no means certain. Incumbents like AT&T and Verizon fought tooth and nail against attempts to cut into their lucrative phone-call businesses. To young people today, that sounds crazy: Pay for a phone call? But it was a big money-maker for the companies that had spent billions building PSTNs (Public-Switched Telephone Networks) to provide asynchronous POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service).

I became immersed in that industry in the late 1980’s. As VP Marketing for a startup called Network Products Corporation, we created and marketed the first asynchronous communications server that you could directly attach to a PC network (at the time, the industry-leading Novell NetWare). I had to become an expert on dialup modems (the prior way you would access networks from computers and terminals), and worked directly with a variety of networking and communications legends from that era. When I became editor-in-chief of Network Computing Magazine in the early 90’s, I was an early user of Radiomail, wireless email achieved through a clunky combination of a wireless modem and an HP95LX PDA (personal digital assistant, part of the fossil record leading to Apple’s iPhone).

In the mid-90’s, there were several parallel efforts to use the Internet’s nascent infrastructure to do voice calls, and one of the early champions was an entrepreneur named Jeff Pulver, who in 1994 founded pulver.com, one of the first Web sites promoting voice-over-the-net. In 1995, the Israeli company VocalTec released the Internet Phone — IPhone, with a capital I — and later that year Jeff co-founded Free World Dialup (FWD), which allowed users to do Internet voice calls to each other (but not to phones). In 1998 Jeff helped to found VONage, essentially recreating some of the same communications infrastructure needed to do POTS calls over the Internet, using VocalTec’s IPhone for users. 

Jeff subsequently began organizing VON (Voice Over the Network) conferences, bringing together the hodgepodge ecosystem of catalysts attempting to treat the Internet like an open communications service. He continued his entrepreneurial activities, and the incumbents increased their efforts to get Internet telephony regulated like traditional phone services. In 2003, Jeff filed a petition to the FCC to classify FWD as an Internet service, and in 2004, the FCC issued what became known as the Pulver Order — allowing Internet services to be untaxed and unregulated.

From a technical standpoint, why was this transition inevitable? It all comes down to packets. The brilliance of Vint and Bob’s work was to codify the transmission of data by breaking text and other digital information into small chunks, adding some information about where it came from and where it should go, and sending each of those “packets” independently over a network. Because this work was done through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the original intention was to create resilient networks that could survive attacks on communications centers. But it turned out that a packet-based approach was exactly what was needed for virtually all kinds of communications.

If you wrote a letter as a series of postcards, you would probably write your return address and the destination address on each card, as well as a sequence number, and no matter how those cards got routed through the mail system, the recipient could re-assemble the postcards, put them in order, and read your message. That’s how packet systems work. 

The problem for voice calls is that the packets have to move very quickly, arriving pretty much in sequence and without losing many packets, or else you couldn’t understand the other person’s voice. Early Internet infrastructure simply couldn’t move packets very quickly, and because you would often use a clunky dialup modem, those early voice calls weren’t always satisfying. 

But they were free.

To commemorate the release of the Pulver Order, Jeff convened a who’s who of the early communications arena. The session at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, was a long stroll down memory lane, with attendees and speakers illustrating the chain from Ham operators to PC-based Bulletin Board System (BBS) managers to VoIP calls. Terri Natoli, who was an acting division chief at the FCC, actually co-authored the draft of the Order.  Glenn Richards, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop, offered some especially cogent thoughts on the dynamics of the time — including the insight that we still need more competition today. Other speakers and attendees included Andy Abramson (who moderated the sessions), Richard Shockey, Ed Guy, Jeff Carlisle, Matt Brill, Eric Burger.

Given the inexorable march of exponential technologies, it was inevitable that the old PSTN would eventually switch to packet-based networks, and in fact virtually every communication of voice and data today happens over packet networks. But even though the incumbent companies were shifting in the early 2000’s to packet-based networks themselves, they remained intent on maintaining their markets, and fought competition every step of the way. But the Pulver Order opened the floodgates, and countless applications that sent information and voice over the Internet were spawned.

What should you do Next?

• Thank Jeff Pulver. :)

-gB Gary A. Bolles

I’m the author of The Next Rules of Work: The mindset, skillset, and toolset to lead your organization through uncertainty. I’m also the adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity Group. I have over 1.4 million learners for my courses on LinkedIn Learning. I'm a partner in the consulting firm Charrette LLC. I'm a senior advisor to aca.so, building the Community Operating System for organizations. I’m the co-founder of eParachute.com. I'm an original founder of SoCap Global, and the former editorial director of 6 tech magazines. Learn more at gbolles.com