A month ago, we reported on the travails of popular phone conferencing service freeconference, upon which many nonprofits and grassroots organizations depend. I wanted to follow that up, and in particular to climb down from initial concern that freeconference had become crippled as a possible conferencing solution. Without rehashing all the details in the original post, the nub of the matter is that a commercial dispute led a few telcos to begin blocking calls to freeconference. Freeconference has worked this adroitly -- it does help to be in the right -- getting in front with bloggers to generate a hue and cry that's apparently stayed any further damage. After blogging the subject before, I even got a follow-up press release from a PR firm a couple weeks ago that began:

Blocked Conference Calls Cripples Food Programs to the Hungry LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AT&T/Cingular, Sprint and Qwest are blocking access to free conference calling which also is impeding efforts by the California Hunger Action Coalition to stop hunger, according to Frank Tamborello, Executive Director of Hunger Action Los Angeles and Co-Chairperson of the Coalition. The action coalition has depended upon FreeConference for more than four years to connect its volunteers statewide with free conference calling. (etc.)

Though we're interested in this row as a net neutrality-type issue and a manifestation of the ruptures of business models evolving with new technologies, our first concern -- as both a user of the service and a technology provider to many other users -- is squarely in the realm of the pragmatic: can an organization that needs a reliable connection count on freeconference? I'm happy to say that for the time being the answer is yes. From my own experience on about a dozen such calls in the past month, the service's workaround of offering two different dial-in lines with the same password has completely handled the problem, and the telcos have not so far taken any other aggressive steps noticeable from a consumer standpoint. (The alternate call-in lines have even had the same numbers the entire time.) Though the situation bears continued monitoring, there doesn't appear to be any reason at the moment that freeconference users shouldn't continue to stick with the service.