Looks like Jeff Pulver has done it again.  After his very first FWD (Free World Dialup) back in the mid 90's (with Vocaltec's Internet Phone, a program which I was lucky to get a free license for, as a thank you for being one of the original beta testers), his second one FWD launched in 2002 (courtesy of a SIP registrar), Jeff now has topped himself again by having a new service called Bellster (maybe a wordplay meaning how to get Bell service the Napster way - i.e. for free).

Bellster is essentially a P2P (Peer To Peer) service that enables users to share their phone lines to make "free" calls anywhere within the reach of the global PSTN network.  The system does not provide actual PSTN access, but it assists a user to find other users sharing their lines via Asterisk (please see photo to the left), an open-source PBX (believe it or not, for an open source PBX, Asterisk has quite a decent list of features that is growing over time - it has been impressive to see this grow over time). 

Callers can call any phone number in the world by sending the call via Internet to a shared phone line near the person that is being called.  That is pretty similar to the very first FWD, except for certain rules.  The system is setup based on a "social rules arbitrage" code.  In other words, users have to earn credits before being able to make these free calls, and these credits are directly proportional to the amount and duration of calls that users allow to move over their private lines.  Jeff Pulver already listed in this blog the countries that are currently supported by Bellster, and the list includes the US, Canada, Russia, France, Italy, the UK, Germany, Argentina and Brazil, among others.

So what is the catch?  For one, the investment in the Asterisk PBX ($1,030, quite a steep initial investment to make supposedly "free" calls - a payback period of more than 20 months for someone making $50 worth of calls per month).  The second possible deterrent is privacy.  Because the call goes through the Internet, there could be very little in the way of assurances of a secure call.  Hence, security could be a major concern.  But still, this is cutting edge in that calls can be made from a PC to a phone anywhere else in the world.  It is also a service that is growing quite fast, with the recent tally showing 22 countries available and 487 nodes registered across them.

Update (26/01): Another issue that I forgot to mention is the cost of local calls in some regions.  For instance, in South America and Europe, each local call costs (taking Brazil as an example, each local call during business hours costs an "impulse" for the first few minutes, and then additional ones after that, much like a pay phone in the US; the story changes during the evenings and weekends when each call is one impulse, no matter how long it is).  These costs would be billed to the local user, so obviously there is an imbalance there versus in North America (US and Canada), where users can make unlimitted local calls paying the same monthly flat fee.  That said, on the plus side, the receiving end does not need to have a computer or any broadband access (in case someone wants to call their grandma who is not a computer user).