Vonage equips PSAPs with VoIP

Vonage Equips Over 100 New Counties and 400 Calling Centers With E911 in Just One Month, Vonage Press Release, March 7, 2006

http://www.vonage.com/corporate/press_index.php?PR=2006_03_07_0 Links to an external site.

"Nearly 65 Percent of Vonage Customers Now Have E911"

"In February alone, Vonage equipped an additional 400 calling centers in over 100 new counties with E911 -- bringing the total number of calling centers across the nation with E911 service to over 3400, which is more than half of the nation’s calling centers. While it took Vonage less than a year to turn on E911 in more than one-half of the nation’s PSAP’s, it took the wireless industry 10 years to accomplish the same feat."

"In the event Vonage is unable to connect to the 911 system or for customers who are using mobile devices such as wifi phones or softclients, Vonage offers a national emergency call center which enables customers to get local help when they need it."

Transcript

[slide438] They realized that, actually, why don't we just give VoIP phones to all the public safety answering points? Right? Because what's the difficulty that they face? To actually get the calls there, they had the gateway from their VoIP system into the public switch telephony network to actually deliver the call via the normal PSTN system. Of course, the operators that they were competing with didn't like this, so they made that process really slow. So instead, they just simply started giving away their VoIP service to the public safety answering points, and in a very short period of time, yes, 65% of the people within only a matter of months, now could make a VoIP call that went via VoIP to the PSTN. And this was really very interesting. So it took them less than a year to cross the 50% point. It took the cellular industry 10 years to reach that level of penetration to get the cellular networks connected to the PSAPs. That, to me, is really very revealing. That they could make such a change so fast by simply saying, fine, we just make the PSAPs so that they can use VoIP, too. So, any questions? If not, see you this afternoon at 1 o'clock.