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VoIP Providers Prepared to Cut Off Customers Over 911 Service

Posted on: Friday, 26 August 2005, 12:00 CDT

Aug. 26--People with Internet-based telephone service could find themselves without a dial tone Tuesday if they ignore notices about their 911 service.

The Federal Communications Commission is requiring Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, providers to disconnect customers who don't respond by Monday to letters or e-mails spelling out limitations to their enhanced 911 service.

Enhanced 911 automatically displays a caller's address and telephone number to an emergency operator; standard 911 doesn't reveal the caller's location or number.

The FCC ordered the notices so Internet phone-service customers won't mistakenly think that their 911 service works the same as it does with traditional phone service.

Some VoIP providers require people to take steps to activate their 911 service, while others don't offer enhanced 911 at all.

The FCC is requiring Internet phone providers to offer enhanced 911, but that rule won't take effect until later this year. An FCC spokeswoman said she couldn't explain why the commission required loss of service for failure to respond.

The National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates issued a national alert about the situation this week.

"Our big purpose here is consumer awareness,'' said Ryan Lippe, spokesman for the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, a member of that national group. "There could be a significant number of customers disconnected if they treat the notice as junk mail.''

Customers who didn't receive or misplaced their 911 notice should contact their provider, Lippe said.

At least one large central Ohio provider of VoIP, Time Warner cable, said it won't cut off any of its nearly 25,000 Columbus-area digital-phone customers next week.

Operations manager Robert Finney said the company has sent notices reminding people that their phone service won't work if their home loses power or if their high-speed Internet connection goes down.

Because Time Warner customers are told they could lose 911 service when they sign up for the phone service, it doesn't think it's required to disconnect people who don't respond, Finney said. Time Warner's service includes enhanced 911.

Vonage spokeswoman Brooke Schulz said about 30,000 of its 800,000 customers nationally face disconnection Tuesday if they don't reply. Vonage is the nation's largest VoIP provider. It did not provide Columbus numbers.

Schulz said the company has stepped up efforts during the past two weeks to reach customers who have not responded, sending voice-mail messages and placing automatic calls to customers. It doesn't offer enhanced 911 service in Columbus.

Unlike the traditional telephone network, whose phone numbers are associated with a specific location, VoIP users can place a call from anywhere they have access to a high-speed Internet connection.

That "roaming'' flexibility, while generally viewed as a benefit, can make it more difficult to connect VoIP accounts to the computer systems that route 911 calls to the nearest emergency dispatcher and transmit the caller's location and phone number to the operator answering the call.

As a result, most VoIP providers have been able to offer only a watered-down version of 911 service that often directs emergency calls to a general administrative phone number at a local public safety office.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this story.

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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TWX,

Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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