The world of VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) telephony is in a bit of a muddle right now, thanks to a federal government mandate regarding E911 service. You see, a little over 4 months ago, the FCC told VoIP providers that they had 120 days to connect all their users to E911 emergency services or face a shutdown of their telephone services. And those 120 days are now up!
A little background before we go any further. For those who don’t know, VoIP telephone services use the Internet to connect phone-to-phone rather than regular phone wires, thereby passing up regular phone companies like Qwest and Verizon. It requires that the user have a high speed Internet connection (like fiber, cable modem, or DSL). It works just like a regular phone as each VoIP user has a regular phone number and uses the regular telephones in your home. No special equipment is required, except for a small router that is added to your Internet wires inside the house.
As I have written before here, we have VoIP services in our home using a company called Packet8. We no longer use a regular phone company. We pay a flat fee of $20 per month for unlimited phone calls throughout the US and Canada, so it is obviously much cheaper than regular phone service. And it works just fine. We chose Packet8 over the better-known VoIP phone company Vonage as Packet8 could provide a local phone number for our area, something Vonage still can’t do.
The big fuss over E911 comes from the fact that most VoIP companies didn’t offer it at first, so users didn’t have a way of calling 9-1-1 in case of emergency. Packet8 quietly began offering genuine E911 service for $2.00 a month extra as an option. But the real problem came when Vonage began advertising that they had E911 service. In fact, they didn’t have true emergency service. If a Vonage customer called 9-1-1, the phone call was directed to the business office of the local emergency services instead of the emergency desk, which could be a major problem if someone called with an emergency after business hours.
This happened in Texas several months ago when a young girl called 9-1-1 to report that her parents had been shot by an intruder. The home was equipped with Vonage service and the call came in the evening when the 9-1-1-business office was closed. Both parents died. The story garnered national media attention and eventually the federal government became involved. Hence, the recent FCC mandates.
The problem is, of course, implementing such a major technological change in such a short time. None of the VoIP phone companies have completely finished the project. Vonage and Packet8 are well along the way (we have been notified that we are now connected), but not yet complete. Vonage says they won’t have complete E911 service to all their customers until mid-2006. Packet8 says that all their users should be connected soon, but they have set up interim measures to insure that all users will have some sort of 911 by using a national call desk. How will the FCC react?
At this point no one really knows. Officials at the FCC say they're still reviewing documents that were filed by VoIP providers before the deadline. That means it's impossible to say for certain how many VoIP companies are in compliance with the mandate. Some experts believe that the FCC will not strictly enforce the mandate, so long as VoIP companies are making progress.
The FCC did modify their original mandate to say the if a company does not comply, they don’t have to shut down their services, but they cannot offer any services to new customers.
Both Vonage and Packet8 say they plan to continue marketing to prospective customers and signing them up for their service, but in doing so the companies risk racking up heavy fines.
"I don't know what the next step is," said Bryan Martin, president and CEO of Packet8. "This is the final filing since the FCC issued its mandate 120 days ago. We had a collective sigh of relief the other day after we filed, but now we don't know what comes next or how the FCC will react to our filing."
Other companies have done next-to-nothing about compliance. There have been complaints that some tradition local phone companies are dragging their feet to help VoIP companies connect to E911, as their help is necessary. Some companies also complain that their industry is being singled out by this mandate by pointing out that cell phone companies have not been forced to connect and that only half of all cell phone users nationwide have E911 connections.
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks.
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