[Asterisk-biz] Vonage bows to 911 pressure

[Paul]

alex at pilosoft.com wrote:

>On Thu, 5 May 2005, Paul wrote:
>
>  
>
>>We really need to convince the regulators that mandatory 911 support for
>>voip is senseless. Wireless 911 is based on the tower you are using at
>>the time, not the wireless company you have an account with. Real 911
>>support for voip would place a burden on the ISP to provide IP to
>>physical address mapping. Even worse, the voip provider might have to
>>refuse device registration when such mapping is not available in order
>>to comply with the regulations. You take your ata or softphone to a
>>hotel whose ISP does not provide the mapping and you can't make calls.  
>>That dog won't hunt.
>>    
>>
>All of the above makes sense for mobile providers. Sort of. For fixed line 
>providers, you have no excuses. 
>
>For mobile providers, you *must* give an option to the customer to provide
>their location in case they have emergency. Face it - people don't move 
>*all that often* and all the talk about "hunting for the location" is just 
>creating excuses to not to provide emergency service in the most likely 
>case - when the customer at his stationary location.
>
>I don't see what's wrong with FCC requiring that. 
>  
>
Actually, I agree with you as long as the provider never gets penalized 
or incurs costs when the subscriber fails to do his part. His part is to 
provide the right information if he is stationary or opt-out of E911 
service. If he opts out, he can still call 911 and talk to somebody but 
he should be charged for that call since it will have to go through a 
call center. I guess my worry is that the voip provider relies on the 
subscriber to report his location correctly. If he fails to do that the 
provider should never be penalized. The current E911 system relies 
heavily on information provided by the people who actually know where 
the copper wire goes. A few years ago I got a pots line at a previously 
unwired address. The ILEC made calls to the town hall, the postmaster 
and the chief of the volunteer fire department to confirm the address. A 
voip provider can't do that. Even if they restricted me to an IP address 
or subnet they would still need me to keep them updated. I can move 100 
miles away but if I stay with the same dsl provider I will have the same 
IP addresses.