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Vonage Puts VoIP 911 Caller on Hold
kamikaze-Tech writes "It is being reported on the Vonage Forums that last month when Loren Veltkamp's
Chanhassen, Minnesota home caught on fire, he immediately called 9-1-1 using
Vonage. Unfortunately,
Vonage put him on hold, causing a delay in the response from emergency
workers. By the time fire crews arrived, the fire had become a five-alarm blaze.
The house was a total loss."
This "article" is a duplicate thread on the Vonage Forum. The original thread has much more information.
This is no different than the 911 service on PSTN (regular phone service).
I've been put on hold at least 50-60% of the time I've called.
They're understaffed.
Was this his only phone?
Any reason he didn't have access to another phone?
Traditionally you exit your burning house ASAP and call from a house next door...
-nB
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They claim to be associating establishing a physical location with each E911, at so many counties per week. Yet someone on the blog points out in Ohio they're moving at a snail's pace and only in 4 rural counties. Sounds like my office, let's process ~1,500 applications, which average about 30 minutes each, by one person, who is being phased out due to lack of work. It done be amazing.
"please click on 1 if you have just seen bigfoot, click on 2 if a wolf has lept through your living room window, click 3 if you believe CowboyNeal is lurking under your bed, click 4 if you laughed so hard at the last South Park that you are choking on a cheezy poof, click 5 if you are so offended by the last South Park you are choking on a cheezy poof, click 6 if you think The Lakers is a stupid name for a team that moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles where there are no lakes, click 7 if your house is on fire and your children have flown, click 8 if you are suffering a medical emergency, click 9 if you are "dying zerelda, dying zerelda, die, die, die, die, die, die!!!" or stay on the line and listen to some light jazz until your connection is mysteriously dropped."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
try calling 911 on a POTS line or cell phone in any major city and see for yourself.
Tried to follow the link in the story, but the server put me on hold....
It is being reported on the Vonage Forums that last month when Loren Veltkamp's Chanhassen, Minnesota home caught on fire, he immediately called 9-1-1 using Vonage. Unfortunately, Vonage put him on hold,
Next at 6: Slashdot links to Vonage-forum, forum webserver puts thousands on hold and THEN catches fire.
PS:Houses usually don't "catch" fire, like they're standing around and fire lands on them out of the blue. How'd the guy's house actually catch fire? Why didn't he have an extinguisher? Why didn't he hang up the phone and DIAL AGAIN?
PPS:The above is half serious and half spoofing the typical "apologist" line.
Please help metamoderate.
I live about 6 minutes away from chanhassen, and the last time I called 911 I was put on hold. I called from a cell phone not voip so I'm geussing its just the local emergency services fault.
I think their new commercial should show a guy getting Vonage and then his house burns down, and then they say, "People do stupid things. Going with Vonage is one of them."
I had to call 911 a few times in the past few years, and every single time I've had nothing but trouble from them. One time when I witnessed a car accident and stayed to help, I called 911 because a woman at the scene had trouble getting out of her car (the door wouldn't open and her legs were pinned). The 911 operator *wouldn't believe* that she needed help and refused to send more than one police car. Luckily he came quickly and called for the proper help. Another time I had to call, I was transfered to the wrong emergency service. I needed the police, but was sent to the fire dept. While the fire operator was talking, the 911 operator interrupted the call and transfered me to the EMS! Again, interrupted and finally I got the police. Other times I've had operators who were rude and unhelpful.
So Vonage's 911 seems to be at par with the poor level of service given by the other 911 services.
You can usually do both- just call your local phoneco and ask for a emergency-only line that only dials 911 and 0. Also known as Basic Dial Tone Service, it will cost you someplace between $0-$12/month, depending on whether or not they force you to get local dialing with it or not, and what taxes apply. Don't forget to plug in an old fashioned WIRED phone to the line, so that you have service in case of a power outage as well.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
They're giving him $20 credit and 7% off all his future 911 calls.
A few weeks ago I was rear ended. The damage to my car was pretty extensive, so one of my passengers called 911 while I talked to the other driver. He was on hold for well over five minutes. When someone finally answered, he handed the phone to me. I talked for about 4 seconds before being cut off by the operator. The nice version is that if no one was bleeding or dead, she was hanging up to deal with more important calls.
The call centers are vastly understaffed, which isn't Vonage's fault, so people get put on hold. End of story.
Plug a phone into your wall outlet, or if you have a spare disconnected cell phone, keep it charged and make sure your family knows where it is. 911 service works on any phone line in the U.S. even if the service is not activated. We have Vonage, but we also have a backup phone plugged into the wall. The Internet is something I would want to rely on in an emergency.
This should surprise no one. 911 is not anywhere near as reliable as you think it could or should be. A friend of mine nearly cut off this thumb with a chop saw. He ran into the house, called 911, and .... it was busy. Rather than dick around bleeding (drip, drip), he called the one person he knew he could rely on: his office secretary (three cheers for secretaries!) She called the local ambulance service, they picked up, took him to the hospital, and after a little tendon reattachment surgery and months of rehab, he was good as new. No thanks to 911.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Flanders drives into his driveway and Bart panics, pleading with Lisa to leave. Instead she climbs the stairs, but Bart warns her she'll be trapped. He sees Ned looking angry, walking with an ax.
Bart: [watching Flanders] An ax. He's got an ax! I'll save you, Lisa! [tries to walk on his broken leg, falls back] Uh, I'll save you by calling the police. [dials 911]
Voice: Hello, and welcome to the Springfield Police Department Resc-u- Fone[tm]. If you know the name of the felony being committed, press one. To choose from a list of felonies, press two. If you are being murdered or calling from a rotary phone, please stay on the line.
Bart: [growls, punches some numbers]
Voice: You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one.
If you are ever woken up by the smell of smoke/fire in your house, you have just about three minutes to get out before you die. Basicly, the amount of smoke and gasses in the air that are enough to wake you up are jsut slightly les then it takes to kill you.
Also, a tiny fire can turn life threatening in jsut a couple of minutes. Fire is not somehitn to be fucked with.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
was convicted for assaulting a former tenant of his while performing a "citizen's arrest" for failure to pay rent. He appealed the case pro se, and unsurprisingly lost on his irrelevent legal arguments. The man seems to be a bit nutty, if not dangerous.
I had a similar experience. Except instead of relying on others I applied pressure to my finger and drove to the hospital. In fact I've never taken an ambulance to the hospital for anything even when I broke my shin. I hopped to my truck, jumped in and drove to the hospital and hopped into the emergency room.
most of the publically available numbers are not staffed 24/7 and are usually not the appropriate numbers for dispatch. call your local police department and you'll generally get a nice voice menu where you have to navigate 15 levels deep to reach someone.
only 911 is guaranteed to be staffed 24/7.
I see no conclusive evidence to blame Vonage.
/. story any consideration; there simply aren't enough details, and I think the station that first reported the story isn't trustworthy for detailed, accurate stories.
TFA doesn't explain what "put on hold" is. This vague problem could be with any number of systems, which could belong to Qwest (very big here in Minnesota), or some other company. Or , to echo other comments, the 911 center in Chanhassen ould have been understaffed and may have put the caller on hold.
Moreover, KSTP Channel 5 has shitty sensationalist news. I live in Saint Paul MN. In my opinion, Channel five news is a joke. The news team offers interesting headlines without necesary details in the actual stories.
In conclucsion, readers, please don't give this ancedotal
Actually, speaking as a former firefighter, it isn't common for folks to misunderstand how dangerous a fire can be. Most folks freak completely out. They panic, and make mistakes they should know better than to do.
Small grease fires take out a whole kitched because the panicked homeowner throws water on it, instead of something like flour.
It's simple Fight or Flight syndrome. Most folks run for it (flight), but without applying a thought process to what they are doing. Those that try to deal (fight) with it aren't usually trained to deal with it properly. Sometimes even those that ARE trained get caught by something they didn't expect.
Fires are nothing to mess around with. Those that have a healthy respect for them can deal with it once they are properly trained. Those that don't, tend to die, even with training. Just check out the number of firefighters that die each year due to really dumb things like buildings falling on them.
Most firefighter deaths (that aren't due to traffic accidents or heart attacks) were completely preventable. There's usually a cover-up, for the officers in charge, all the way down to even the victim's themselves. Nobody wants to tarnish a hero's legacy, even if said "hero" had their head up their ass and was in a place they should have known better than to be, or was doing something they shouldn't have done. The public doesn't end up knowing, but most of it ends up getting caught on tape by some bystander, and then the government ends up buying the tape rights so that it doesn't get on the 11 o'clock news. Then, they show it as training video, and tell us "See, these guys are dumbfucks, and so is their commanding officer". And yet, more than half the class would still make the same mistake.
disclaimer: I work in the telecom field.
Vonage put the call on hold?? Or was it the 911 operator?
I wasn't aware Vonage operated 911 call centers. Do they have SLAs with emergency responders?
If Vonage [equipment] didn't answer the call, they were just providing the transport.
Next time the wife hangs up on me am I supposed to call Cingular and open a trouble ticket
for dropped calls on my cell phone?
Please.
a real firefighter would never suggest throwing flour onto a fire, flour explodes when thrown into flame
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
And in the UK... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/govt_numbe r/
"Around seven in ten calls to the 999 service are not deemed to be emergencies, thus clogging up the system and making it harder for staff to handle urgent calls. Which is why the government wants a new Single Non-Emergency Number (SNEN).
The new SNEN service - 101 - will be used for people to report matters such as vandalism, graffiti, and noisy neighbours."
(I think 999, 911 and 112 are equivalent in the UK, but 999 is most familiar to most people, I've only ever dialed 999 though.)
This happened frquently and I had to teach her to just be persistant and keep phoning until they listened. Her mom was very ill. Crap like this does happen and often they don't get it right.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a knowledgeable instructor said (sarcastically) "You'd be better off throwing flour", knowing that flour could ultimately become a fuel. Then trainee misunderstands the sarcasm as "Flour is a really good idea".
Now, one thing I'd say is that throwing flour from 5 feet away would creat a nice fine mist of fuel that military types call FAE (Fuel/Air Explosive). Bad, bad news.
On the other hand, pouring a couple of kilos of flower from a foot or two away would attack the two primary methods of stopping a fire:
- cool the fuel. If you have more flour than grease, the flour will cool the grease -- probably below the burning point. At this point, you have the ability to move the pan from the burner... (further cooling the fire).
- deprive it of oxygen (or -- to put it another way, deprive the oxygen of flame-temperature fuel. The flour will congeal and cut down on the spattering of the grease which gives a nice fuel-air interface. It can also cover the surface of the grease (before it sinks) -- once again depriving the fuel of it's oxygen (or vice versa).
Water, on the other hand, will just instantly expand into steam, and toss grease into the air -- in a fine mist of flame-temperature fuel. When that hits the air, instead of cooling, it will light on fire which will further heat nearby dropletsWhen flour hits hot grease, there's a chemical reaction that takes place (first step for making cream sauces). This reaction is probably endothermic, which would further cool the fuel.
Strangely this is actually how placing a lid on the pot helps to put out a fire... It removes the exothermic ("hot") fuel-air interface point from the surface of the grease, thus slowing down the feedback loop of heating the grease from both top and bottom -- now you just need to get the bottom of the grease away from the hot burner....
So, he's not completely out to lunch -- but I'd say that if you have an ABC or K fire extinguisher on hand, or just a lid (or another, larger pan), that's probably a better solution ... Just remember... Never put water on an oil/grease/gasoline fire.
Last point: Firefighters walk into these kinds of fires with equipment that goes well beyond choosing between flour and baking soda. If it gets to the point where a (fully suited) firefighter is choosing between flour and baking soda to put out a fire, (s)he's probably also wondering about whether his/her last will and testament is up to date. I seriously doubt that they get in-depth training about the nuances of using common kitchen ingredients as firefighting tools.
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