Vonage 911 service

http://www.vonage.com/no_flash/features.php?feature=911

User must pre-designate the physical location of their Vonage line and update Vonage when the user moves
911 dialing is not automatically a feature of having a line
- users must pre-activate 911 dialing
- user may decline 911 dialing
A 911 dialed call will be connected to a general access line at the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) thus they will not know your phone number or location
Service may not be available due to
- a local power failure (your IP phone needs power)
- you local ISP not being able to offer service
- one of the transit networks not being able to offer service
- the voice gateway to the PSTN not being in service
- …

Slide Notes

Vonage, “About Vonage”, http://www.vonage.com/corporate/aboutus_fastfacts.ph Links to an external site., Last modified March 12, 2006 13:53:55, accessed on 2006.03.12

Transcript

[slide437] And I propose that we'll cover this slide and then come back this afternoon.

So the last slide for the morning is about Vonage. Vonage was one of the early companies to introduce Voice over IP. And they basically used analog telephony adapters and connected them to regular telephones. And the problem was people thought they were telephones. Right? Looks like a telephone. Acts like a telephone. It must be a telephone. Well, the bad thing was there was an emergency involving a babysitter and some children in Texas, and the babysitter picked up the telephone and dialed 9-1-1. Vonage had no support for 9-1-1 calls because they were not in the telephony business. They were in the Voice over IP business. Yes. So there's a big lawsuit, and they took a very interesting approach.

They said, okay, what's the first thing we can do? We revise our contract to say, if you want, we can associate your particular VoIP user agent with a particular public safety answering point. You tell us your location. We'll put in the right information, so if you make a call to the number 9-1-1 on your keyboard, we'll redirect it to the public service safety answering point. But you have to agree that if you have a local power failure, it won't work. Whereas regular telephones would work, even if the power fails. Why? Because the telephone exchange powered the phone. If your local ISP can't provide the service, it may not work. If one of the transit networks doesn't work, it might not work. If the voice gateway to the PSTN is not working, it might not work, etc. You sign this long legal agreement, and then what did they do?