Internet phone calling sounds kind of geeky. I admit that. Yet, when I donned my headset, called up my Internet phone software and made a couple of calls from my Oregon home to Florida yesterday, my Mom said that was the clearest I sounded in quite some time.
Despite Internet phone calling's excellent quality - and its willing acceptance by some three million U.S. subscribers- Internet telephony has one big flaw. This is a vulnerability that the Federal Communications Commission will likely address when it meets on Thursday.
This bugaboo is a big one: because Internet phone calls are made from an Internet "address" on a computer, and not from a phone associated with a physical address, 911 response centers throughout the U.S. are often unable to determine the street address of the emergency.
When that happens, the consequences can range from inconvenience to potentially fatal. In February, a husband and wife in Houston, Tex. were shot and injured by burglars. When their daughter tried to call 911 on the family's Internet phone, the call did not go through. She ran to a neighbor and placed the call. The incident sparked a lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said that Internet phone company Vonage, on whose line the child tried to call 911, does not conspicuously inform new customers of these 911 access problems.
Solutions exist to enable these calls to go right through to emergency dispatchers. But since these solutions would likely involve major established phone companies granting their upstart Internet phone competitors access to their 911 calling networks, the four major regional phone companies in the U.S.- Verizon, SBC, BellSouth and Qwest- have been slow to enable their growing rivals into their infrastructure.
They kept on saying that because the problems involved in granting such access were so technically complex in nature, resolution would take time and effort.
Notice I said "have been slow," not "are slow." When new FCC Chair Kevin Martin took over from Michael Powell in March, he immediately made noise that the body might just have to mandate such access. The telcos harrumphed for a few weeks - but now, all of a sudden they are making nice.
- The big telcos are trying to forestall an FCC mandate by claiming they are making progress in the 911 area.
- The big telcos' major institutional shareholders are freaked that a mandate will result in uncertainty. The markets hate uncertainty.
- The big telcos are afraid of a black eye. To many customers, 911 access doesn't signify a tech issue.
Help is on the way. Tomorrow, in all likelihood, the FCC will give the big telcos 120 days to make it so.
Russell Shaw is a technology and politics author, journalist, blogger and consultant in Portland, Oregon. Author of seven books, he writes the daily IP Telephony Blog for ZDNet. His website is www.russellshaw.net.