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FCC: VoIP Providers Must Provide 911 Services
acadiel writes "The Houston Chronicle is reporting that the FCC will require VoIP providers to provide 911 location services. This will mean extra $$$ that the VoIP providers will have to put out, which ultimately means extra $$$ that the consumer will have to put out. This is the first step in regulating an industry that should have been left alone..." I hope network end-points and physical location aren't going to be too tightly linked; one of the appeals of VoIP is using it from anywhere that has an adequate Internet connection.
Yeah really. Imagine if someone had to remember the local 7 digit number for their police station. That'd be awful! 7 digits is very hard! Especially hard to write down next to your phone so you always have it handy!
I have no telephone. I hate the damn things, and have to use one all the time at work anyway.
Am I going to be forced to get one so that I have the ability to call 911, should the need arise?
Oh look, the real world has expectations of the new medium. How tragic. Turns out there's some value-add we can't overlook in the over-priced, over-regulated, monopolized phone system. VoIP want's to compete with/replace POTS, it will have to meet the standard of POTS. Nothing to see here, please move along.
The question I have is whether VoIP will be expected to provide the same level of universal access that we have with the phone system. I doubt it. They'll probably just cherry pick their customers like the broadband carriers. The Slashdot crowd will grouse whenever the "legacy" system cries foul and tries to prevent this. Learn something here.
This naive attitude about regulation and competition ("This is the first step in regulating an industry that should have been left alone...") pisses me off. There are good reasons for the regulatory system. There were good reasons why, at one point, you couldn't connect anything other than genuine Ma-Bell gear to Ma-Bell's lines, and there were good reasons for changing that, and the reasons had nothing to do with keeping the proverbial fat cats fat, despite what you want to believe. In fact you, dear reader, most likely lack the knowledge and experience necessary to cope with the reasons, and I'd appreciate it if you would behave as such. The reasons have to do with reliability, ubiquity and stability (read: not neato geek fun) in an enterprise that involves hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that must survive decades of reality. We get all that cheap and have for a century. Take your file-pirating, selectively lazie-fare opinion and stuff it where the bits rot.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
And no - I'm not a typical /. liberal - it's just that I understand the technical issues involved in providing 911 location for IP addresses, and you probably don't unless you're an expert in DNS.
I was going to post this anonymously, but fuck it - you're so patronising and transparently stupid that I have probably just been trolled.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!