Vonage 911 Deadline Passed

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is reporting that the FCC may block any new customers wishing to sign up with Vonage. The internet phone service company has passed the Monday deadline that was given to them to provide reliable 911 service. From the article: "The company -- which has more than 1 million subscribers -- said it was capable of transmitting a call back number and location for 100 percent of its subscribers, but that it still was waiting for cooperation from competitors that control the 911 network."

Wait... I just got an e-mail on the 26th that says

[DaedalusLogic]

We have completed 911 Dialing activation for your Vonage line...

Now when you dial 911, Vonage will route your call to a general number at your nearest emergency response center, based on the address below:

If this address is incorrect, simply click on the following link to login to your web account https://secure.vonage.com/vonage-web/features/inde x.htm [vonage.com] and edit your information from the 911 Dialing feature box.

Please note if you move your device you must reactivate 911 Dialing with your new address. If you add a line to your account you will need to activate 911 Dialing for that line as well.

If you would like more information about Vonage's 911 Dialing service, please visit the 911 Feature page at http://www.vonage.com./ [www.vonage.com] If you have any questions please reply to this email, or call us Toll Free at: 1-VONAGE-HELP (1-866-243-4357), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We appreciate your business. ...

So what gives?

I have been....

[Dayze!Confused]

using Vonage for nearly six months now and have had no trouble with their service. I do have some trouble with my phone getting caller ID and not ringing, but that is a case for another day.

they have it in Canada

[jest3r]

Vonage.ca has 911. You just have to tell them where your primary residence is.

http://www.vonage.ca/features.php?feature=911 [vonage.ca]

Re:Wait... I just got an e-mail on the 26th that s

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA, hack

The problem isn't that Vonage doesn't let your reach a 911 operator (though in the past, that has been a problem in some areas)

The problem is that the 911 operator doesn't get your number and address. Name and address are Enhanced 911 (E911), and that's the requirement. Without E911, the 911 operator has no idea who you are nor where you are.

Editors have never heard of fact checking

[technoviper]

From Vonage's own site
http://www.vonage.com./features.php?feature=911 [www.vonage.com]

RTFC... Jackass

[DaedalusLogic]

They included my address in the e-mail... and that's what they are reporting for E911.

I have been a customer for years... using really old Cisco ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) hardware... in one of the smaller metro markets they are in... If they can get to me, I would expect them to be hitting more than 26% of their customer base. This surprises me that Vonage didn't meet the mark, it also surprises me that the FCC might have to be involved.

It doesn't surprise me however that some A-C asswipe would troll on my contribution of a piece of information that illustrates my experience as an actual customer.

Re:Wait... I just got an e-mail on the 26th that s

[DeepRedux]

911 is not the same as E911 (enhanced 911). Vonage is being required to support E911, not just 911.

911 can mean just routing the call to a center based on your address. E911 requires that the center also receive your address and phone number.

Re:Shouldn't the cell phone companies provide this

[drinkypoo]

Cell phone providers are now required to support E911. To wit:

The wireless E911 program is divided into two parts - Phase I and Phase II. Phase I requires carriers, upon appropriate request by a local Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), to report the telephone number of a wireless 911 caller and the location of the antenna that received the call. Phase II requires wireless carriers to provide far more precise location information, within 50 to 300 meters in most cases.

The deployment of E911 requires the development of new technologies and upgrades to local 911 PSAPs, as well as coordination among public safety agencies, wireless carriers, technology vendors, equipment manufacturers, and local wireline carriers. The FCC established a four-year rollout schedule for Phase II, beginning October 1, 2001 and to be completed by December 31, 2005.

(Source: http://www.fcc.gov/911/enhanced/ [fcc.gov])

In order to implement E911, GPS is necessary. In some areas you can get quite excellent pinpointing from cell triangulation, but not in others, due to terrain features, buildings, and other sources of interference. Thus, it will be impossible to purchase a cellular phone without GPS in the US starting January 1. Even phones which do not provide GPS functionality to the user will contain GPS! All of them.

(Disclaimer: "The FCC has granted various limited waivers of the Phase II rules to wireless carriers, subject to revised deployment schedules and quarterly reporting requirements.") - see the linked page above.

933

[tscheez]

From an email I got 2 weeks ago
"We've made it easy for you to check your 911 coverage. If you dial 933 from your Vonage phone, TCS's VoIP Verify service will inform you how your emergency calls will be routed and what information you should be prepared to provide to the emergency services operator."

Re:indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll. In my state it's not a trivial deal to simply call 911 to see if it's working. By state law, if you call 911 the police must respond with a trip to your house. They must enter your house and do a physical inspection to make sure everything is A-OK for every call to 911 regardless of the reason.

So in AK, if you follow the parents advice, expect a visit from a very unhappy police officer.

Re:Editors have never heard of fact checking

[gpw213]

Did you actually read the page you linked?

The page states that they have 911 service, but:

When the center receives your call, the operator will not have your address and may not have your phone number on hand, so you must provide that information in order to get help.

Then lower down, it talks about "E911 coming soon", which is what the orginal article was talking about.

Re:RTFC... Jackass

[shawb]

According to Vonage, they have the capability it's just that the telephone companies that control the E911 services aren't holding up their end of the deal in some markets. My guess is it doesn't really matter much what hardware you have so much as where you live.

Re:Shouldn't the cell phone companies provide this

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"In order to implement E911, GPS is necessary."

Not the case. While CDMA and iDEN phones do need GPS to provide reliable triangulation, GSM triangulation systems exist that provide position with sufficent accuracy to meet E911 requirements:

http://www.trueposition.com/news_07.23.03_tmobile. php [trueposition.com]

Re:Packet8

[Woody77]

"land-lines" have a major advantage over cell phones (at least in california). Here, if you call 911 on a cell phone, you get forwarded to one of two CHP call centers, they can be massively swamped during rush hour, and really have no idea about your area.

A land-line 911 call, however, goes straight into your local fire/ems dispatch center, and they usually respond faster, respond the right engines/ambulances, and even get the roads right.

(volunteer FF in Cali)

What about this?

[andermic]

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

Re:Wait... I just got an e-mail on the 26th that s

[mynametaken]

I work for a company that provides E911 service for VoIP providers. I won't get into all the details but there are quite a few misconceptions so far on this board. The big problem with VoIP, other than the fact that we can't determine where you are (unlike wireless where at least we know your closest cell tower, if not your GPS or location via triangulation) is the totally nomadic nature of the device. Right now if you don't tell us where you are we have no clue. You could be in Australia. There are lots of technical proposals for this (DHCP sending Geopriv location when you get IP, etc.) but none are there yet.

A basic primer: the E911 network is actually a separate network. The local Wireline End Office switch has dedicated trunks to a 911 tandem (aka Selective Router), which has dedicated trunks to a set of PSAPs (local 911 call centers). For wireless the wireless carriers simply ordered dedicated trunks from their local MSC (mobile switching center) to these selective routers. Obviously, Vonage does not have a local presence. They had to figure out a way to connect to all 650 selective routers nationwide from their data centers. Imagine now some local startup in Florida that has to connect redundant T-1s (the requirement of the ILECs like SBC in order to have E911 access) to all 650 selective routers. It ain't going to happen in 120 days.

Wait, we're not done. The next issue is how to transmit the address of the subscriber to the PSAP real-time. The wireline E911 databases hold static addresses under the assumption that you never moved. This doesn't work when you can move your device. If I live in Texas but travel to Chicago for work (and go to the website to update my address) how do I get the address into the right system real-time? These databases are mostly managed by the ILECs and there are probably 50 or so out there, each totally standalone. The legacy 911 service order processes of the phone companies for order flowthrough typically take a few days.

Fortunately, the wireless carriers figured out a solution: real-time steering from the local 911 database to a central datastore which transmits the location. For wireless the X,Y coordinates are transmitted. We piggy-backed off this standard but had to modify it to support civic locations (well, MSAG, but that's another essay). Of course, the ILECs (SBC, etc.) required new agreements for this. It also requires a new query key assigned for VoIP so everyone knows this is a VoIP call and the carrier to call in the event of a problem. This query key lets the local 911 database know which provider to query. This query key also gets around the constraint of the selective routers that only support local rate center NPA/NXXs. Basically, if you have a Chicago number in Dallas you can't get your call through. A p-ANI was developed for wireless to get around that.

Here's the problem: the query keys must be assigned to each provider. These are called ESQKs, or p-ANIs in the industry. The FCC was supposed to name a numbering authority to distribute these keys to all the providers. The industry recommended Neustar as the temporary RNA. Until this is done noone can provide true E911. Well, the FCC has been silent on this so we have all been in a Catch-22 situation.

Re:Fines

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe part of the wireless argument was that they needed to get newer handsets out to their users, with GPS capability. Without that, they had nothing.

Maybe that was their argument, but most U.S. wireless providers do not have GPS in their "E911-capable" handsets. In fact, Cingular just uses triangulation that they claim to be accurate to within 50 meters

Re:Packet8

[Anonymous Coward]

That is total BS. I was in the hurricane, and, well, about 10 minutes after the winds started picking up a little bit, I lost internet. About 20 minutes into it, I lost power. The phone lines in my area are electrical with rather small generators, so when the power goes out, you lose land line service after a couple hours. The water pumps also are electrical and when their generators died, we had no water pressure (which took about 2 days for them to die, and they came and put a new, huge generator on the street about 2 days after that). Land line service did not return for about 3 weeks, a couple days after the power came back. Internet just returned 2 days ago (Adelphia). My Verizon cell phone worked throughout the entire hurricane with absolutely no problems, and not once went down after the hurricane that I know of. If I hate to wait 3 weeks for my land line phones to start working again, I wouldn't have been able to call my family DURING the hurricane and then afterwards in order to ensure everyone knew that we were ok. As far as I'm concerned, the cell phones once again showed why they were superior to land lines, as I was able to contact my family without a 3 week waiting period for phone service that the land lines required.

It also reminded me that Adelphia is still total crap, and I can't wait until they are bought out so maybe someone can keep the lines maintained.

Re:indeed

[doj8]

Depending on how your local jurisdiction works, calling 911 without an emergency may constitute a crime. In Hawaii, it is a misdeamenor. Some areas in the country have a $1,000 fine and potentially jail time - presumably that is for flagrant false alarms. It would be foolish to risk that without checking with your local police department FIRST.

Calling the local police and asking whether you can test your 911 calling (explaining you now have VOIP) *BEFORE* you just call 911 would be prudent.

Since Alaska (and presumably other jurisdictions) apparently requires a visit by a police officer for each 911 call, no matter how it is ended, they may well consider any false 911 call to be an offense. Which is reasonable on the police's part, it could actually be an emergency, but the caller no longer feels safe saying so, so they've got to check it out. Most jurisdictions charge for false alarms, often rather expensively.

Re:Shouldn't the cell phone companies provide this

[Baricom]

Most Vonage adapters will presumably be kept indoors. GPS doesn't work very well indoors.

Re:Fines

[TallMatthew]

No one has died trying to call 911 over VoIP. You might argue that someone hasn't been saved because they didn't have 911 service, but that doesn't make much sense either. An Operator can put you through to emergency services.

I worked at a CLEC that provided voice services to businesses over VoIP. We ran into this same problem. For every customer, we had to provide a POTS line for 911 service. Not that anyone knew where it was or that it worked, but it had to be there. It sounds more like a shakedown than a public safety initiative to me.