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."

Comments

Re:Most already have it...

[pavera]

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.

Re:120 days....

[Shishak]

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.