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I just got Vonage, and it has pseudo 911. You activate it by entering your address.

It's not real 911 because it connects to an intermediary service that then connects you to the real 911.

http://www.vonage.com/help_knowledgeBase_article.p hp?article=394

I just clicked an ad for Vonage and there was a pretty concise explanation about thier 911 service. I had no problem understanding that A) I would need to provide my Physical location info B) this required a manual registration on my part C) It would not be available immediately D) It would be subject to service interruption so if no power or no internet no 911 (duh) E) The 911 call center will not have my location automatically so I need to provide my info F) It is on my head if I decline or fail to register for 911 service.

http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911 If you want to see for yourself. They detail pretty clear the drawbacks to the service. This took seconds to check.

It's always nice to see complete fucking crackpots on slashdot. "Let them believe" ??? What, is this some type of fairytale? It's all spelled out clearly here

If they'd bother to have read any of the documentation that came with their package, (e.g. the shit with big letters that says "READ THIS TO SETUP 911 DIALING SERVICE"), then they wouldn't have faced this problem. If they would've tested the 911 service as vonage indicates is okay to do (and encourgaged in minnesota), then this problem might have been avoided. Jesus, the first time you login to your account online it screams in big red letters about setting up 911 until you have.

Nobody forced them to get vonage. They were given explicit instructions to setup their service for 911. What? They didn't read it and didn't bother to do this simple 3 minute task? They ignorantly assumed it was identical to their old land line? Tough titty. Life's a bitch.

For more info see info on NIU disconnect.

If there's a fire I have to: 1. Break Glass/Open Cabinet, 2. Read Terms of Service, 3. Discover that this handle I'm about to pull is non-functional because the emergency service hasn't been properly activated... Then expect to be sued into the stone age by everyone who gets hurt in the fire, and lose. Badly.

Your logic doesn't work. See, you're supposed to read the terms of service before there's a fire. The same way that you need to read contracts before signing them, and the same reason why you need to make yourself familiar with the operation of any emergency equipment before an emergency occurs. Vonage is very clear about this before you set up service. In this case, the user needed to take responsibility and set up their 911 service, and they didn't. Furthermore, their POTS line, even if disconnected, is required by law to service 911 calls at no cost to the user. If they had thought ahead, they could have plugged a phone into the POTS line and had full 911 service...or even opted in for free E911 service via Vonage. They did neither, and now, there's an AG blaming everyone but the people who didn't plan ahead for emergencies like they should have.

I'll agree that something needs to be done, but fingerpointing lawsuits aren't it. Maybe mandating cooperation between LEC's, 911 call centers, and VoIP providers would do it...but suing the nearest company is just counterproducitve and dumb.

You must tell everyone in your house that you don't have Traditional 911:

"If you activate Vonage 911-type dialing service, you agree to inform any household residents, guests and other third persons who may be present at the physical location where you utilize the Service as to the important differences and limitations of Vonage 911 dialing service as compared with traditional 911 or E911 dialing that are set forth in this Agreement."

And it may not work during non-business hours since they aren't contacting the PSAP in the same way your telco did:

"When you dial 911, your call is routed from the Vonage network to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) or local emergency service personnel designated for the address that you listed at the time of activation. You acknowledge and understand that when you dial 911 from your Vonage equipment it is intended that you will be routed to the general telephone number for the PSAP or local emergency service provider (which may not be answered outside business hours), and may not be routed to the 911 dispatcher(s) who are specifically designated to receive incoming 911 calls using traditional 911 dialing."

There's some more information on their carefully named Vonage Lets You Dial 911 page.

You must tell everyone in your house that you don't have Traditional 911:

"If you activate Vonage 911-type dialing service, you agree to inform any household residents, guests and other third persons who may be present at the physical location where you utilize the Service as to the important differences and limitations of Vonage 911 dialing service as compared with traditional 911 or E911 dialing that are set forth in this Agreement."

And it may not work during non-business hours since they aren't contacting the PSAP in the same way your telco did:

"When you dial 911, your call is routed from the Vonage network to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) or local emergency service personnel designated for the address that you listed at the time of activation. You acknowledge and understand that when you dial 911 from your Vonage equipment it is intended that you will be routed to the general telephone number for the PSAP or local emergency service provider (which may not be answered outside business hours), and may not be routed to the 911 dispatcher(s) who are specifically designated to receive incoming 911 calls using traditional 911 dialing."

There's some more information on their carefully named Vonage Lets You Dial 911 page.

The Terms of Service is not the only place the 911 info is located. It's at the TOP of the features page (across two columns with a read table heading), it's on the "about vonage" page, and they have multiple FAQs.

They still need to let people know about the limitation, even if it isn't their fault.

They do -- and they are very clear about it. This Texas AG is suing the wrong people, and shouldn't be suing anyone over this. What needs to happen is cooperation between the emergency call centers and Vonage (apparently, the number where the 911 call gets routed to is a secret). Furthermore, Vonage customers who want 911 service need to update their location whenever they move their phones to a different location. If that takes annoying legislation, sobeit.

As a general rule, I'm a strong believer that any argument that consumers must be responsible has to be balanced by responsibility from the producers of the products they consume. That means clear warnings about how a product or service might differ from expectations, critical safety issues, etc. If an informed consumer in a genuinely competitive market then chooses a product unsuited to them, then that's their problem.

Looking at Vonage's product page, it's clear 911 is advertised as a benefit, not an optional extra that isn't a real 911 service. While the information that it's actually an optional (albeit free) feature is a click away, there's no actual reason in the way 911 service is presented to a potential customer to encourage such a person to assume there would be more to it, and that clicking on that link actually provides important information.

The link, in some ways, is discredited by what it links to. "911 Dialing" isn't a "great benefit" of Vonage, it's optional, it's not a real 911 service ("Your Call Will Go To A General Access Line at the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). This is different from the 911 Emergency Response Center where traditional 911 calls go."), and in some circumstances will not work anyway.

I think the more something becomes a critical safety issue, the more important it is for a provider to be upfront and straightforward and tell the truth - and not just do so by avoiding lying or using turns of phrase it knows will be misunderstood - but to actually say "If you get this product, you should know that XYZ will have the following limitations".

Vonage isn't doing this. I think they should. And I think, be it through lawsuits or FCC actions, they should be forced to.

I personally wouldn't have followed the link had I not read this article. It all looks a little more flaky than I thought was the case.

This is complete and total hogwash. As a Vonage customer, I can assure you that Vonage makes accurate information about how their "version" of 911-dialing works. This includes an explanation of the differences. In fact, dialing 911 is no problem, but the call goes to a general number at the PSAP, and you have to provide information on your location. There are several reasons for this limitation, including, but not limited to incompatibilities between the VoIP systems and Emergency Response Centers, and also roadblocking by your regional Bell monopoly. The test market in RI has basically upgraded the equipment at the Emergency Reponse Center to work will with VoIP service, and if the government would backslap the local Bell monopolies and provide the SAME PUBLIC FUNDING THAT WAS PROVIDED TO THE REGIONAL BELLS IN THE PAST, this service would be available quickly for everyone.

If you want more information about what Vonage provides, try their FAQ. While I don't think that the think tank at Vonage is all perfume and roses, please at least be informed and be critical of areas where criticism is due, like maybe not being especially forthcoming about the poor quality of FAX service.

Isn't one of the points of VOIP that you can take your number with you anywhere in cyberspace? Call from your house in the suburbs, your downtown office, or the Marriot three time zones away?

There's no reasonable way to require the service to map 911 services if they don't know where you are.

As for Vonage, there's a link on their home page for 911 Dialing. If you click on it, you see that it's an extra service and all the limitations are clearly laid out, including the need to update them with your location and the fact that it'll only call the current designated location.

Nice SIP exchange and client so that someone can call me with my yahoo email address (Sorta like FWD plus vonage) . Its gonna happen very soon with one of the big players as they have the country presences.

Maybe FWD, Vonage, Yahoo and Google could co-operate? (..hey a flying pig!)

The answer to your question is in the Step by Step Home Wiring Setup" in the Vonage Faq.

What I would like to know is if this Astrix PBX they talked about in the article can be used to replace the ATA Vonage hands out. I'm pretty sure Vonage won't let me return the ATA for any value, but Astrix looks to have more features.

Um, then why do they charge up to $1.75 per minute to call Kiribati? Even a call to France runs $0.03/min. And their "unlimited" price of $29/month is double what I would pay a local carrier (less ld charges).

http://www.vonage.com/intrates.php

I noticed that too...

From the Vonage site:

Customers may be experiencing an issue with receiving inbound calls and placing outbound calls due to a network issue. This problem is also impacting availability of our web site.

Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Vonage says this about satellite internet:

Yes, our service generally works with DSL Satellite Internet connections or any Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) device (i.e. your home router). DSL requires Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) authentication "username & password" to access the Internet so you will have to configure your Vonage adapter or home router for this service. There may be some latency inherent on a satellite connection or line of sight issues that could affect audio quality when making calls through the Vonage service. Our calls require 90 kbps of consistent upload/download speed to make and receive calls through the Vonage network.

I've been living in Santa Barbara with a Phoenix area code (using Vonage) for over a year, and I'm hardly an early adopter.

Answered my own question:
http://www.vonage.com/help_knowledgeBase_article.p hp?article=649

BTW, I love Vonage.

Here's the link to see if you can keep your number.

Your Call Will Go To A General Access Line at the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). This is different from the 911 Emergency Response Center where traditional 911 calls go.

The only service from a major VoIP provider that I am aware of is the afore mentioned packet8. I'm sure this change over time.

BTW, Packet8 charges a $10 setup fee and a $1.50 monthly fee for E911 (RBOCs also charge for this service - but you have no choice)

That used to be true. Vonage supplies your address to 911

I myself know that when my cable ISP starts offering voip im dropping my phone service from the local provider.

Does your cable company offer broadband?

Why wait for your cable company to offer VOIP. Signup for Vonage, Broadvox, etc now.

Rates are at

http://www.vonage.com/intrates.php

From what I've heard Comcast is going to charge a whopping $39.95 per month for its service. That doesn't sound like too much of a deal to me compared to Vonage's $24.99 a month deal.

This might kill certain services, but none that would be liable to adversely affect the typical residential customer.
Are you nuts? It would kill bi-directional VoiP (such as Vonage), which requires certain ports, and a lot of them. Vonage has over 400,000 customers as of 01/05/05; a lot of them will be pissed if their service was unusable.

people who are highly inconvenienced by the change would have to upgrade their ISP accounts to "corporate" levels, paying a higher fee.
Let's think about this: if people want to do something, they will do it. If they want to use P2P apps, then they will upgade the account. How does that really block P2P use? All it really does is force people to pay more for a service they already use.

Dude, have you actually checked the price list? It's just not worth the trouble!!!

Calls within the US and Canada are unmetered. I call my parents back in Wisconsin and just don't bother hanging up, leave the line open for a few days, it costs ZERO EXTRA. So what, you hijack my account? Have a ball! See if I care!

Now, I have some friends in Australia. I call them all the time. The biggest impediment is the time zone difference, not the cost -- calls to frickin' Australia are $0.04/minute! It's literally cheaper, per-minute, to make a VoIP call to the opposite end of planet Earth than to get a seat at the local movie theater.

Sure, someone could jack my account to call a cellphone in Afghanistan at $1.25/min, but that's the kind of length you'd have to go to....

Vonage already offers softphone service. Although it wasn't designed for use on a PDA, of course the guys over at engadget had to make it work.

This is how Vonage Handles 911 Dialing. Basically, you have to activate it by telling them your phisical address. Once you do, 911 calls are directed to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) in your area -- when I tested it, they answered "911 Emergency Services" and knew exactly where I was.

This seems like a reasonable way to do things for people like myself who don't relocate with my VoIP box. However, the question of people who do relocate frequently is a good thing to consider. I believe (although I'm not sure) that if I move to a different area with my Vonage box, the 911 service is automatically deactivated and I must re-enable it again.

I do not see any difference in using "very expensive air phone" vs. using your own cellular at plane.

Due to technical limitation your mobile phone need to be connected with another device at the same airplane. Thus - airplanes will simply provide you an roaming access for mobile.

The costs for outgoing calls in such "roaming" access will the same as costs of using regular airplane phones.

The only difference you will observe is the ability to accept incomming calls !! So - there will not be a cheap phone access at airplanes.

P.S. If there are WiFi already allowed - use your notebook with VOIP. For example with Vonage ;-)

>Does anybody know of a IP service that allows all of these services?

http://www.vonage.com/

At my company we use open source projects such as BIND (for an ENUM / DNS based call routing directory) around the edges of our VoiceXML / VOIP IVR hosting service, but not in our core platform.

Originally we did use early open source VOIP projects such as OpenH323. OpenH323 was great, but it needed to be replaced as we moved to SIP and required reliability beyond what OpenH323 offered.

Asterisk is in a similar place - it is a great project that has seen some great early success in voip. I have heard that Vonage, for example, uses it in their voicemail system. I also use it at home and we have several projects at work in the research phase that incorporate it.

Asterisk is not reliable enough for our production environment today - reboots every few weeks to few months are common. As a project it is similar to where Linux was 5+ years ago - plenty of momentum but not quite ready for mission critical use. I have no doubt Asterisk will become as pervasive and reliable as Linux and other leading open source projects have though. Asterisk is an extremely flexible, easy to work with project; and the people involved are also easy to work with and know telephony very well.

This story seemed like no big deal to me. I've been using my Siemens Gigaset 8825 with VoIP from Packet8 for several months now. Packet8 send you a network interface box that has an RJ-45 for your broadband connection and an RJ-11 for your phone, and boom! You're in business. Line 1 of my Siemens is landline (still needed for 911, faxing, and reliability during power failures); Line 2 is VoIP with unmetered long distance and an area code of my choice that gives my friends two states away the ability to call me with a local call. 20 bucks a month. You could do the same thing with Vonage but they're 25 bucks a month. IMHO, using VoIP with Packet8 or Vonage is much preferable to Skype because
a) It doesn't require a computer in the loop.
b) It works with any telephone.
Of course it could be better; it could be open source hardware so we could build/program the network interface boxes ourselves, but hey, it ain't bad for now.

I'd much rather have a service like Vonage. It's simple to use, has a nice web GUI, is incredibly clear, and can work seemlessly with your existing telephone number.

Vonage has a plan that gives you 500 minutes for $14.99 per month.

Even transferring my phone number was painless. I just faxed them a phone bill and they took care of the rest.

I was a little concerned with "voice lag", where you get that delay effect, but so far it's been unnoticeable. (but I also have a four megabit cable modem).

In short, Vonage has rocked so far. I had my doubts about VoIP, but no doubts any longer.

Go with Vonage and dump the fees.

Just a happy Vonage user...disclaimers apply... enjoy.

This was probably what you were looking for, and it took me all of a few seconds to find it.

If you want to imagine a world government, think of the whole world run by the phone company and nowhere else to go. -- Lenny Bruce

Except people in the coming years may find a contradiction between "phone company" and "nowhere else to go", making it harder to understand the analogy.

As someone noted before in this thread, Skype is just one form of VoIP, and it doesn't even follow open standard, instead it implements its own format. Stanaphone OTOH uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), not only allows outcalls to POTS/mobile, but it also assigns a phone number to each user, so users can actually receive phone calls as well. It works with Windows, Pocket PC and includes voice mail and call forwarding. And it can be used with SIP phones, which can be plugged directly to a LAN and be ready to use in seconds - no PC needed.

Of course there's Vonage , which can also be used from a Pocket PC (just install SJPhone and configure your account), and place/receive calls from POTS/mobile. The problem is that Vonage is only available to US customers, while Stanaphone is available to anyone anywhere.

Cell phone comapnies may even take an interest as pocket pc's become more popular.

Not to mention local internet providers. Dial up would loose its last few subscribers and broadband providers would need to offer something extra to keep its customers from taking advantage of free internet.

Even after all the news surrounding the recent VoIP problems, wiretapping, TOS agreements, etc I still just signed up for Vonage, the $30/month for unlimited local and long distance was to good to pass up (Not to mention my great dislike for my current telco and the fact that I can't get another one unless I lived on the other side of the street).
My question though about wiretapping is: Is it that big of a deal? From what I've read the same rules apply, so they can't just tap into you for no reason at all. So it just seems sort of like a moot point to scream and yell about VoIP tapping, since landlines have already had that for quite some time. Where's the "This is bad because" deal? Are we worried that because now that there's a wiretapping rule in place that it means that there's the potential for hackers to exploit it? Something else?

This is all explained in their FAQ.

One thing I like about Vonage is that you are using a regular telephone (wired or cordless) with the system instead of being tied to a headset that is wired to your computer. There is a USB headset that is wireless. See here. I have not used it, but it is advertised and makes sense that there is a product. Also you might find something with Hello Direct

MP3 player with iTunes support

Browser that supports WAP, HTML, Frames, Flash, Shockwave, Tabbed Browsing, and thumb-guestures

8 MegaPixel camera with 6x optical zoom that takes SLR lenses

Calander and contacts that syncs with microsoft exchange

2.2" display with 65K colors and 480x640 resolution

802.11g and bluetooth (that works) with kismet

12 cell LiIon battery with 14 day standby and 6 hour talk time

media player capable of playing MOV, MPG2,4, AVI (divx and xvid), RM, DVD,

HDTV that syncs with your tivo, direct-tv, XP-MCE, or mythPC (sorry MyHTPC and freevo, not enough room in ROM)

Direct TV connection with 400 channels

Cheap custom ringtones that dont suck (no more paying 99 cents for a 50 cent ringtone)

Vibrate, Pulsate, Ultra-Vibrate, and Orgasmobrate (for her pleasure)

authentic TOS trek sound for when the clam shell flips open

Walkie-Talkie function that be used without speakphone

SDIO card for memory expansion

4G 1MB/s internet connection

RSS feeds on your "desktop"

9 button thats not pre-programmed to 911

full QWERTY thumbboard with touchpad

VNC, TightVNC, and Terminal Services

Vi, Emacs, Notepad, and that thing macs use

Powerpoint support with included VGA dongle for presentations

SMS, MMS, EMS, and PMS

synchronization support for pop3, imap4, and active-sync

drivers for linux (source included)

dual boot mode with windows CE and linux (2.7)

included sample cowboy neal ringtones

j2me, perl, and C# support

graphing calculator

Included USB cable makes phone act as USB flash drive on any PC (w2k+)

GPS with included geocaches

ability to turn reciever into promiscuious mode with ethercap

SSH (1,2) and Telnet clients that work!

1GHz Transmeta processor

Via Eden 600 MHz backup processor

dual blue cold cathodes with case window

Support for CD-R / RW, DVD-R-RW+R+RW-RAM, MMC, SD, CF, PCMCIA, and 5.25" (double density)

Did I miss anything...

Oh yeah, Phone. Maybe next revision, until then you can hook it up to your vonage box.

Ok, so I was only joking on a few of those things, but seriously some of these features need to be considered. I want an open platform phone that allows me to put RSS feeds on my "desktop" and can SSH and VNC into boxen (sp?)

Does vonage use SIP? I would think not, but I noticed that both use the same softphone
http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=softpho ne
http://sipphone.com/softphone/

Don't tell me Xten thought ahead and created a transport abstraction so that either could be used... cause I want to use GAIM with my vonage account!

Where's the compilable source to a SIP softphone for PalmOS, that is a useful Asterix client and, like SJPhone and Xten, also work with Vonage's softphone accounts?