[asterisk-biz] FWD moving to $30 annual membership fee

[Nitzan Kon]

--- On Tue, 8/12/08, SIP <sip at arcdiv.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure how charging for something that has lasted
> this long for free will necessarily kill it off.

I hate to say this, but going from a million users to 800 is
pretty much the same as killing it. The whole point behind
FWD is that you can talk for free to people who are connected 
to the FWD network. If the people are gone - so is FWD.

> That's $24,000/year more than you had before to handle
> costs such as bandwidth, hosting, hardware maintenance, 
> etc (none of which are minimal).

And who's going to pay the sysadmins? If you can find me a
competent sysadmin that'll work for a $24k/year salary - I 
have a job for them. ;);)

> More important questions for ME would be are they still
> going to allow incoming calls into their network from 
> outside? Or will you have to be an official FWD peer (which 
> is a pay-per-connection peering network) ?

I don't think this is going to matter, given the user count
will drop so drastically that there will be no reason to peer
to them anyway...

I think pretty much the only users who will pay are those who
will do so in a "thank you for the past" manner. I don't see
anyone paying because they think they'll derive actual value 
from the "new" PWD.

So basically, you're left with a handful of users, and zero
prospects to gain NEW users. A year later the chances of the
existing users to remain get slimmer.. and the more users
leave - the less motivation existing users have to remain.

Sounds to me like a recipe for a dying service.

Don't get me wrong- I have nothing against FWD and I wish
them all the best. But I think they are making a HUGE mistake
here and they will probably not survive it.

--
Nitzan Kon, CEO
Future Nine Corporation
www.future-nine.com