Vonage Defies FCC E911 Order and Continues To Market VoIP

Posts: 114 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Aug 05, 2005 Posts: 114

Yeah but 10% of 1 millon is 100,000 so I could see we have 65-80% of those users here, most people only come looking when there are problems....

Posts: 8 · Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 3:55 pm Post subject:

I had a similar experience to blutarsky when it came to setting up 911 service. The problem with my address is that Mapquest has got all of the streets in my neck of the woods completely mislabeled! I know that it's not their fault... the navigation system in my car and two different computer-based street map programs show exactly the same mis-information. Unfortunately, nobody wants to 'fess up about the original source of the data. I've reported the errors to Mapquest and suggested that they pass the info along to their service provider, but it may be years until it's fixed.

In the meantime, I found a bogus address in Mapquest that was close to my house (this is a rural, dirt road kind of place... the next nearest house is a quarter-mile away) and used that to successfully activate 911 (otherwise I'd lose service altogether). Don't freak out about the deception! We kept our POTS so that locals could call us (no local Vonage numbers here), and would use that phone for 911 calls anyway, not the Vonage phone. Also, POTS has the advantage that when the power goes out (which it does very regularly here), we still have a working, albeit local-call-only, phone. If we're ever going to have an emergency, I expect it to happen when the power's out, so what good would Vonage 911 service do me anyway?

What I can't understand is that we've had E911 service for a couple of years now. That's where our street address came from... before that it was just "End of Smith Road." Obviously the E911 database must be available somehow, so why does Vonage rely on something as goofy as Mapquest for something as critical as emergency services?

Posts: 119 · Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 8:25 pm Post subject: The Database

I am not sure if you read the whole post, but there is not an E-911 database available. Vonage is taking the extra step and doing that. Mapping out each router one at a time, and doing things right rather than slapping it togeather with a dataset used by someone like mapquest!
Vonage wants to do it right the first time, and get things done!