I should have commented sooner on the FCC ruling requiring VoIP providers provide E911 service to their users. The chatter on the Asterisk-Biz mailing list pretty much sums it up. In essence: if you depend on your cable service for telephone service, you depend on your cable provider for 911 services. If your experience is like most and your cable service goes out when it rains within a thousand miles, are you really dumb enough to think that VoIP phone will work when you have an emergency?

Most VoIP-savvy people aren’t that naive. That’s why they keep a landline handy. Or a cellphone or two, at least. Requiring VoIP providers to offer 911 service is putting lipstick on a pig. VoIP is still a pig, Commissioners!

How about mandating 99.999% uptime for cable providers while you’re at it? Maybe you could rule that UDP packets, upon which VoIP is based, must guarantee delivery? Or, on a more practical level, why not require incumbent telcos to maintain 911 service on ALL existing residential lines, hooked up to your service or not?

VoIP gurus like Jeff Pulver opine that this is a sneaky move by the incumbent carriers to put the brakes on VoIP competition. As the FCC ruling isn’t really going to make people any safer, one has to wonder if Pulver is right.

VoIP changes the game. There is no longer any such thing as a permanent location of a phone. It’s time to find other, more creative methods of getting help where its needed.