Jeff Pulver makes it a habit of being disruptive. An early advocate of voice-over-Internet-protocol, he has pioneered early voice services that led to the creation of Vonage, the earliest VOIP rival to the traditional telecom players.

He now runs the Internet company pulver.com and loves to use his own growing media enterprise to push his agenda of opening up telecom networks and liberating new Internet technologies from government regulation. Now VOIP is a multi-billion-dollar business and, ironically enough, the show for VOIP is getting thinner in attendance and its focus is shifting beyond voice to a bundle of unified communications — texting, e-mail, presence, video, and VOIP. I caught up with Pulver, a loquacious man who favors Hawaiian shirts, even while evangelizing VOIP on stage, at the Spring VON.x conference in San Jose this week.

His history has been as a tinkerer who found a cause to get behind. A former ham radio operator, Pulver played around with Internet calling while working a day job on Wall Street. He started the first VON conference in 1997 as a new peer-to-peer technology called SIP (session initiation protocol) was just starting to take hold.

It enabled Internet phone calls. That was the beginning of VOIP’s assault on the trillion-dollar telecom industry. Now VOIP is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Then, in 1998, he founded Min-x, the VOIP company that was the predecessor to Vonage. He recruited Jeffery Citron who led a $12 million round of funding and took over as CEO of the company, renamed Vonage. Pulver stayed on the board, but he didn’t stick around long enough to share in the Vonage’s rapid growth and success.

Next, he started Free World Dialup as a VOIP business in 2002. To protect that business, he filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission to ward off attempts by the telecom operators to regulate VOIP. In 2004, the FCC issued the “Pulver Order” saying that VOIP technologies were not subject to regulation as telecommunications services.

“That was a defining moment,” Pulver said. “You could draw a line from that to eBay buying Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005.” (more…)