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VoIP Providers Given 120 Days to Provide 911 Service
linuxwrangler writes "According to this SFGate article, federal regulators have given VoIP providers 120 days to provide 911 service to their customers. The vote came after testimony from people including a Florida woman who had her infant die after being unable to call 911 from her internet phone. VoIP providers are also required to notify their customers of the deadline and of the limitations of VoIP 911 service."
Simple really; the cell network has a seperate channel specifically for 911 service, or at least that's how it was explained to me.
When you don't pay your bill, they block you out of all the channels except the 911 channel. Maybe VoIP providers can use this as a guideline.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
They're already in compliance. You should read the disclaimers though. Every other paragraph goes out of its way to say that this isn't really 911 service. I guess the problem is that it's tied to your voip box. I could pack it in my suitcase and take it to florida on vacation. if I plug it into my mother's cable modem line, my phone number will ring there. Unfortunately, if I dial 911, I get the 911 dispatch center near my home in the chicago area. You can't really fault them for doing it. Maybe they could do some sort of ip address geographic lookup. But I doubt it would be reliable.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Just to plug a company I invest in, 8x8 or Packet8 already has E911 because they use Level3's network. So the message is, use Level3 for your network, have E911, and make me money by increasing Level3's profits! :-)
Granted, I have always paid my bill so I can't tell you for sure. But upon moving into an apartment, I have no dial tone and thus cannot call anywhere until it is hooked up. I assumed it would be the same upon disconnection. No dial tone = no call
True, but a lot of places have stopped cutting out dial tone when there's no service available. When I moved into my apartment several years ago, the place had tone. It couldn't get incoming calls and it could call anywhere (you'd get a recorded message telling you the phone had no service). The only numbers I could dial were emergency numbers and the phone company in order to request service.
I've moved since then, and my new apartment does lack tone (I've switched to cell entirely), however that's just a how this local telco does it, not every telco does that anymore.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Sorry. Incorrect. The reason this works is the system will allow a handset to register on the switch serving the nearest tower, but will block call completion unless the call goes to 911 or in many cases you can charge a call to a credit card, although the rates are quite high.
Currently, with many VoIP providers, you can log in to their website and explicitly tell them where your phone is. If you move, you update this info. The order currently only mandates that user-supplied info be used but strongly suggests that they expect automatic configuration in the future.
As for the traceroute question, the answer is, "Yes." However, I expect to see some resistance on this from the other telecom providers since it means that there will have to be an automated mechanism for finding out what physical line an IP address is connected to that is queriable by third parties. I can imagine all sorts of abuse for this sort of thing, but it seems to be a necessity to ensure emergency services.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The biggest technical problem is that most e-911 calls go on a dedicated trunk to the 911 call center. There is no 'phone number' associated with that line. So what vonage was doing was just getting a listed directory number for the police in a given jurisdiction and forwarding calls to that number. (often not answered at night etc). This order will require the VOIP provider to coordinate with local telephone companies to have the VOIP 911 calls get delivered over those dedicated trunks.
When I subscribed I had to have Vonage configure my 911 service. It took some time, but it ended up working out. The key is this though...if my Broadband connection goes down for any reason, so does my 911 service. SO...I have a stand-by cdll phone just in case.
Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is here. At least with Vonage, the make sure you understand you need to configure 911. User responsibility...go figure.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
So I get the impression the relatively straightforward cases, like VOIP on a home DSL line, are expected to be handled automatically, but the more complicated cases--tunneling your connection back through your home network or whatever--fall under some sort of "well, we warned you, and gave you a way to tell us where you were, it's not our fault if you didn't bother" defense.
--Bruce Fields
Yes, it is really useful to tell a recording where you are! If you RTFA:
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually the packaging mentions it a number of times... as does the install process.
The florida case was the woman's fault. Nothing more.
Yes, it most likely would have been dead but there's this new thing that people are doing called CPR. It helps keep people's body alive long enough to get them to a hospital. I hear that quite a few people have been saved by it. Maybe you've heard of it too?
Besides, how quickly do you answer your front door? The lady had to make the 911 call on her VOIP service, hear the recording, and run outside and across the lawn to the neighbors house while carrying the baby. Then she had to wait for them to answer the door so she could explain the situation and get them to call 911 on their phone. This could have easily taken a few minutes. A few minutes where she could have been doing that new fangled CPR thing.
Ask any paramedic and that few minutes could easily mean the difference between life and death, especially for an infant.
You are dieing or being mugged, or robbed, or kidnapped and you just break away for a couple seconds.
You can't talk.
the 911 service works in such a way that just by dialing those 3 magic numbers the authorities get your location and will arrive shortly thereafter.
with your call center idea, you are dead and by the time someone finds you there are no leads...
with the 911 service at least some of the time the authorities can get there to save you.
Technically there are "phone numbers" associated with those lines, they are just heavily guarded secrets of the ILECs, the only people who know them. 911 call centers have regular numbers associated with them (the association is held in the PSAP database), and when you dial 911, the ILECs switch does a lookup in the PSAP database, finds which call center is responsible for your call, and routes it there. Then when the call hits the call center, their system dips the MSAG database with your phone number and pulls up your street info...
That is the problem with this ruling. It mandates that the VoIP providers provide full 911 service, but doesn't require any cooperation from their main competitors the ILECs. So, if the ILECs choose not to give out the dedicated 911 numbers so that VoIP providers can route directly to them, or if they decide to charge exhorbitant fees (more likely), the FCC has given them a free get out of jail card here. The ILECs by simply not doing anything can put all the VoIP providers out of business now.
Your description may be accurate for many (most) PSAPs served by RBOCs (the baby bells). However, there are 1500 other local telephone companies that serve many rural areas. (I happen to work for one.) I know that not all the PSAPs in our areas have directory numbers associated with them.
I have Vonage VOIP.
Vonage makes it abundantly clear that you must activate 911 Service by providing address information. You'd have to be an absolute idiot to miss this. It's prominently displayed in red at the top of your account dashboard when you log into the site. A glaring red insert is in the box with your phone adapter right on top. It's all over their website for new customers, and everywhere in their FAQs.
I activated my 911 service as soon as I signed up, 'cause it was made imminently clear to me that I needed to do so. By the time my adapter arrived, my 911 service was in place.
If you're too damn stupid to activat the service, I just see it as evolution in action. Hopefully you were too damn dumb to breed yet too.
RTFA. She did.
Finding a neighbor with a phone can take a few minutes. Sometimes (like during the middle of the day) not many people are home. During the middle of the night, not many are awake and some who are will not answer. A few minutes is a lifetime (or the end of one) when someone's not breathing.
They've got everyone's zip code and (I would assume) a directory of each zip code's appropriate 911 response center. How hard is it to make these ends meet?
Well, the issue is that VoIP is mobile. You can take your voip router at home and plug it in at a friend's down the street or on the other side of the globe, and it'll work. Meanwhile, the 911 operator thinks you're at home.
That's why part of this says that the VoIP providers have to have a way for users to update their location.
Of course, I don't know what happens if they're in europe (where emergency service is 112 or something) or any other country.
Speak before you think
Looks like Skype is involved too. The submitted a request to be excluded from the regulations claming that most of their users are mobiel and do not use a handset, but since they do interconnect to the PSTN it looks like they will be are required to offer E911.
Skyped offered a statement day offering to work with the FCC on E911.
So, Vonage connected her to a non-emergency number that is not answered 24/7. Not a good idea. I know that in some cities (such as Denver, where I live), there is no emergency number that is widely published. I can't look one up; 911 is the only number the police provide.
Not sure if anyone's pointed out that, even if you properly set up Vonage's 911 service, their terms of service clearly state that you WON'T be connected to the same 911 center as a landline or cell phone...
my emphasis...
"This? I can make a hat, I can make a brooch, I can make a pterodactyl..."
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
GPS is not an option indoors which limits it to less than 5% of all VoIP phone/device locations.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Wrong,
The PSAP information (911 Tandem switch) is all located in the Local Exchange Routing Guide (LERG). All the VoIP providers need to do is buy a subscription to the LERG from Telcordia and they will have all the information they need. The problem is, that in order to connect to the PSAP you need to be a CLEC with an interconnect Agreement with the RBOC (Verizon, SBC) for the LATA. You also need to build dedicated, diverse trunks into the PSAP switch. Since most VoIP providers are virtual phone companies, they don't have facilities in the LATA where their customers are and therefore they can't build trunks into the PSAP.
Connecting to the PSAP is the easy part, finding out the address of one of my DSL customers that I give a dynamic IP address to is the hard part. I predict a lot of police/fire showing up at my NOC because that is the address on record for the IP.
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
In many places, the police etc. will tell you not to do this.
I have been using VoIP for over a year at home, and I enjoy the technology. I run it over my cable modem. Comparing how reliable my cable service is, vs how reliable my POTS line is; I knew that I needed to keep a minimum POTS line active, just in case.
The device that I use is called a Sipura 3000 analog adapter. It allows my cordless phone system to plug into ethernet for VoIP. Another nice feature is that I can plug my POTS line in to it as well.
I have programmed the device to route 411 and 911 calls made from my cordless phones on to the POTS line instead of the VoIP line. That gives me full, reliable 911 service without having to inform my guests that some phones are for dialing, and other phones are for 911. Every phone can reach 911.
Another nice feature of this system is that it also routes all calls to the POTS line in the event of 1) VoIP service outage or 2) general power outage.
There are also programmable features for routing specific calls to specific gateways based on charateristics that you define. Gateway 0 is for POTS, gateways 1-3 (there are more than 2, can't remember the upper limit) are for VoIP services.
If your VoIP provider allows BYOD, it is definitally worth checking out.
btw: the TX case in this mess is interesting. I was in Houston on business when it happened. The customer in question was interviewed on the news. The customer claimed that he had no knowledge that Vonage did not handle 911. Seeing all the warnings that Vonage give you, it would actually take some effort to ignore the warnings. No sympathy.