[Asterisk-biz] Vonage bows to 911 pressure

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Preston Garrison wrote:

> I think someone needs to stand up and start up a service that provide
> E911 service based on a per call, or per customer level. Its a big
> opportunity for someone to tap into a market that has not been tapped
> into yet, and it would be a welcomed service to many providers. getting
> your own E911 service together may be feasible, however alot of
> providers may trust someone else to do it that has spent alot of time
> figuring out all the quirks. Vonage didn't even want to do it on their
> own, and that should tell you something about it. If it was that simple,
> why would they need to partner with verizon to do it?
Um, well, because Vonage is actually much closer to a lemonade stand than
you'd think. Vonage is not a CLEC in any of the states it provides service
(for tax and I believe liability reasons). Vonage purchases origination
from different small CLEC in each market - and doing e911 would mean they
need to have special deals with each of those, who may or may not have
provided it.  Vonage wasn't really interested in *doing* e911, simply
because they were able to sell their service like hotcakes without doing
it. Now that this is a hot issue, they decided instead of working through 
their origination providers, to just deal directly with the ILECs who are 
maintaining e911, which is fairly smart. 

The "integrated" service you are talking about is Intrado V-9-1-1. It
ain't cheap. But, "you gotta pay yo bills to play with the big dogs in the
tall grass".

Possibly, there could be someone coming out with competition, or rather,
effectively, reselling Intrado - you can't really compete with them as
Intrado keeps the most useful parts of database they "maintain" for NENA
as proprietary information. For example, they collect geographical
coverage but don't publish it as part of the NENA PSAP registry. 

More likely is that CLECs who provide origination will also provide 
e911-related services, reselling intrado in part, and providing their own 
services in part.


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Alex Pilosov    | DSL, Colocation, Hosting Services
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