[Noisebridge-discuss] Little red payphone

Shannon Clark shannon.clark at gmail.com
Sat Dec 13 04:50:02 UTC 2008


Years ago I used Vonage for a few years and I remember that e911 was one (of
many) things which really seriously caused Vonage problems and expenses.
Especially for customers such as myself who were thinking about using it as
a full alternative to a landline - getting 911 to work smoothly had all
sorts of headaches. Wasn't impossible if you registered the location (as I
recall) but got tricky if you ever wanted to move your phone (which was,
after all, one of the points of VOIP).
I'm a bit surprised there aren't more advanced solutions yet - since this
has been an issue (and I think a legal requirement in the US at least) for
quite a few years now.

some quick googleing turned up:

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/voip911.html - "Interconnected" VIOP
mandated requirements around e911

looking at the many other links Google shows on the topic, seems like there
are many vendors offering enterprise/carrier grade solutions, but I didn't
see any open source or free solutions - but perhaps when we work with some
provider to get an inbound number that provider can give us some options?

Definitely still a quite unsolved problem with many issues (I think the
solution of calling a regular number not the real 911 has problems - such as
sometimes those numbers are not staffed 24/7 etc)

but I'm not a telcom guy so I'll leave it in the hands of those who are,

Shannon

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 8:33 PM, Christie Dudley <longobord at gmail.com>wrote:

> The 911 service is the most expensive part of VoIP service.  I know people
> who have gotten around this by mapping the 911 extension in the voip server
> to dial out to the "urgent" line for the police department (which is what
> they recommend using from a cell phone rather than actually calling 911).
>
> Christie
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Shannon Clark <shannon.clark at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Adding an interesting (perhaps randomized?) ringer seems like indeed an
>> opportunity.
>> I'd vote for getting 911 working (which may require some registration to
>> make e911 work over VOIP?) and for keeping the 9 and 1 buttons in their
>> usual places - seems likely that if we have a phone clearly available sooner
>> or later it will need to be used for a 911 call.
>>
>> Shannon
>>
>
>
>
> --
> You can't learn what you think you already know.
>
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