Vonage to improve E911 services

Friday, December 15, 2006

There are a few drawbacks to consider before giving the green light to the decision to move to a VoIP only service (for example building a Skype server). The first that comes to mind is the possibility of a power outage that takes away the connection and therefore the VoIP service. This is easily solved by using an uninterruptible power supply.

The other one is less thought of because it’s hopefully used rarely: emergencies calls. Several VoIP offerings in fact do not allow that kind of calls or require the user to activate them (with the possibility that the customer delays that until it’s needed).

One of the providers was Vonage, the largest VoIP phone service provider in the United States. Some customers complained about the 911 services and specifically about the need to activate them separately without knowing it.

Calling an emergency number without before activating it would then result in a Vonage recorded message instead of the actual call to the number. In some other cases instead even when customers activated the option their full data was not communicated to the emergency operators. Missing data was for example the caller phone number and the information about the location of the caller.

Now the situation is going to change however because of an agreement reached by the VoIP provider and the attorneys of five states. The accord states that Vonage will automatically sign up all customers for the emergency numbers service. Besides the VoIP company will provide all customer’s information when a call to an emergency number is made.

The CEO of Vonage, Michael Snyder, has already said that "over 93 percent of US subscribers lines have full E911 capability". That’s great news for all the VoIP users and another good reason to make the switch.