You're all over thinking this

Thu Jul 21 16:09:26 UTC 2005

Even for fixed, US, residential VoIP, there's another problem: service 
availability. With cell phones, people expect dropped calls and sketchy 
service, and understand misrouted calls to local operators/emergency 
services. It's part of the deal.

But a land line? If I pick up an analog phone anywhere, I expect a dial 
tone, and local calling. If  I don't have access to emergency services 
after a blackout/natural disaster that knocks cell towers down (think 
hurricane season in Florida last year) then you'd never get me to drop 
my local carrier.

I Am Not a Telco Engineer, BUT:
What if part of your monthly VoIP service included a stripped down, 
leased PSTN line from the carrier? Say, another 2 bucks a month.

What's the opex of a single residential phone line? How much does it 
cost to have a live copper pair, and how much does it cost to connect 
said copper to the PSTN? Could local telcos offer nothing but emergency 
local dialing? Say, 911, hospitals, sheriff's office? Or maybe just 
local dialing, with a "by the minute" rate to discourage use? Since most 
residential customers use their ATA's to mimic a single analog line for 
the whole house anyways, why not add an FXO port to the ATA? Set the ATA 
to fail over to the analog line if it loses power. Customers get *real* 
911 service, and telcos won't be stuck with miles of worthless, buried 
line. This solves the "babysitter" problem, too: people who don't care 
how your VoIP setup works; they just expect 911 to do what it's supposed to.

Austin

Steve Gibbard wrote:

>
> I don't know all that much about commercial VOIP service or GPS, but 
> it seems to me I've just read lots and lots of messages citing weird 
> cases where locating a VOIP phone won't work well as evidence that the 
> whole idea is a failure, while none of those cases appear to have much 
> to do with the problem that people have been trying to solve.  The end 
> result of this is that a bunch of people who have loudly written the 
> problem off as impossible then start loudly complaining that those 
> working on the problem didn't ask them how to do it.
>
> The basic problem, if I understand correctly, is this:  For the last 
> several years, anybody picking up phone installed in a reasonably 
> standard way and calling 911 could expect that if weren't able to 
> explain where they were, the police would show up anyway.  It was hard 
> to see this as espionage or as a civil liberties violation -- the wire 
> goes where the wire goes.
>
> Now we've got competition among providers of wire line residential 
> phone service, and the competitors are mostly VOIP companies who 
> provide their service over the users' cable modems.  Since this 
> service is being marketed as equivalent to regular home phone service, 
> and used that way by lots of its customers, it seems reasonable to 
> expect that calling 911 from it would work the same way.  There's a 
> minor problem -- the VOIP carrier often doesn't provide the wire, and 
> thus doesn't know where the wire goes -- but that seems easy enough to 
> get around.  The simplest way to do it would be to ask two questions 
> when the service gets installed:  Is it going to be used in a fixed 
> location, and if so, where?  Asking the same questions again whenever 
> the billing address changes should keep this reasonably up to date.
>
> There are, of course, other ways to do this, which might also work. 
> Whether GPS in the ATA box will work has already been discussed to 
> death here.  Requiring the cable or DSL providers to map IP addresses 
> to installed locations would presumably also work, although with many 
> more layers of complexity to go through to have useful information 
> accompany a phone call.  Anyhow, I'm sure if we leave those questions 
> to those who have to implement it, they'll figure out something that 
> doesn't require too much completely extraneous work on their parts.
>
> There are, of course, VOIP installations where this won't work.  I use 
> a VOIP soft phone through a gateway in San Francisco to call the US 
> from countries where using my US cell phone is expensive, and there 
> are plenty of other people who use VOIP phones in much the same way.  
> Owen maybe isn't quite unique in his bizarre scenario of trying to 
> hide his location by using his wi-fi phone via repeaters from two 
> counties away from the base station.  But these scenarios aren't at 
> all relevant to the problem at hand.  If I need urgent help in a hotel 
> room in a foreign country, I'll grab the hotel phone and call somebody 
> local rather than trying to patch a call through to the US via my 
> computer.  And if Owen were to die because he deliberately hid his 
> location when calling 911 and the ambulance couldn't find him, it 
> would be hard to argue that it would be anybody's fault but Owen's.
>
> At some point it makes sense to solve the problems you can solve, 
> rather than inventing new ones.
>
> Yes, this ignores the cell phone issue, which seems rather different 
> because they're almost always portable.  It's already had years of 
> work put into it, and doesn't need to be reinvented here.
>
> -Steve