FCC To Require 911 for VoIP

Tue May 3 02:47:12 UTC 2005

>You mean like the dozens of dire warnings Vonage has in their product
>to repeatedly remind less clueful and home users to register the
>correct location information for their phone.  And yet, Vonage is
>still being sued by an State Attorney General.

I believe that the incident that provoked this chain of events
involved a Vonage customer who had provided the correct location data,
dialed 911, and was connected to a recording that said "go away and
call us from a real phone."

The problem is that Vonage doesn't want to spend the money to provide
real E911 so instead they have this half-assed service that calls the
phone on the receptionist's desk at the PSAP.  If a VoIP provider
wants to provide real E911, there is no technical bar to their doing
so, using E911 trunks from the CLECs who provide their connection to
the phone network.  VoIP provider Packet8 makes a selling point that
they provide real E911 (at extra cost, about the same as the mandatory
911 fee on a POTS line) in most of the U.S. now.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com