* An FCC mandate about emergency calling should be enforced without damaging fledgling VoIP services.
The Federal Communications Commission has given VoIP carriers another three weeks to notify their customers that 911 might not work the way they expect it to.
The commission had set Sept. 5 as the deadline, but extended it to Sept. 28 since many VoIP providers were unable to comply in time.
The extension is a good thing. If VoIP providers don’t notify their customers by the deadline, they have to cut them off. The FCC doesn’t want customers out there thinking that if they dial 911 it will work like it does on a traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) phone – because it doesn’t.
There are celebrated cases in which VoIP customers dial 911 when burglars are in the house and rather than getting the police, get a recording from their service provider that 911 doesn’t work unless you pay extra for it. And even if you pay extra for it, it doesn’t necessarily work the same way.
With PSTN phones, tying location to phone number is easy; the phones can’t move around. With IP telephony, you can take the phone, plug it into an IP network anywhere, and continue to make calls. That’s one of the beauties of VoIP. But it also means it’s hard to tell the 911 system exactly where a caller is physically located so the nearest police or fire department gets the call.
The FCC rule could have a chilling effect on VoIP providers, many of which are getting by on a shoe string and can’t afford to lose any customers. Customers getting dropped by VoIP providers will reinforce the impression many still hold that VoIP is unreliable. When tied to the scary 911 issue, the impression can become that it is not only unreliable, but also downright dangerous. Neither of these assessments is fair, and the FCC should do what it can to avoid giving this young and fragile industry a bad name. At this time, the widespread bad press that this issue could cause would devastate many of the VoIP providers, forcing them into financial tailspins or bankruptcy.
The FCC may be a little more shrill about this issue than it needs to be, and that may sadly be because of a grab going on between it and state regulators over which will regulate VoIP – to the extent that it will be regulated. Some sanity seems to be taking hold in that the FCC, and state regulators have formed a joint task force to deal with 911.
It is important that this group works well to address legitimate public safety issues without setting back acceptance of VoIP, which is an important new technology that deserves special care during its infancy.
