Minnesota recently decided that VOIP providers like Vonage, Iconnethere and Sipphone should be under the same legislation as any telephony provider. One problem with that legislation is that any telephony provider has to support 9-1-1 calls.
It doesn\’t sound as hard. The problem is that in most countrys and states, the telco has to route the 9-1-1 call to the closest call centre, based on the callers location. With Internet Telephony, there\’s no way to decide where the caller is. One SIP account may have a telephone with a VOIP gateway logged in at home and at the same time being logged in with a SIP software from a WLAN hotspot in another part of the world.
Well, if the SIP provider doesn\’t dow, can we track the caller down based on IP addresses? Well, in some cases the ISP knows the address, but can\’t give it away without an court order. In a lot of cases, the IP number will be virtual. Mobile IP, VPN and other technologies break the structure totally, making sure that any connection between IP address and location is broken.
We could joggle around with GPS receivers connected to phones and make additions to protocols, but even this will be non-functional since in a lot of cases we don\’t want everyone to know where we are. (\”Hi hon, I\’m on my way home, really, I\’m just a kilometer away\”
)…
So I think we just have to face facts, telephony is changing and we have to solve the 9-1-1 problem in another way in this new phone system. The caller needs to give his position, or call with 9-1-1 with area codes. Any other change will dramatically raise the cost for the SIP service provider
and complicate things to the point where we can go back to wireline telephony. And we don\’t want that to happen.