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Vonage: One-Third Of All PSAPs E911 Enabled
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
Vonage Marketing, a subsidiary of Vonage Holdings Corp., a leading provider of broadband phone service, today announced that it has turned on emergency 911 service in over 2,400 PSAPs across the country, which amounts to more than one-third of the nation's total PSAPs.
In comparison, Vonage officials are quick to claim, it took the wireless industry 10 years to turn on emergency 911 service in one-half of the nation's PSAPs.
In June, the FCC gave Vonage, and all Internet-based phone service companies, 120 days to create an E911 system from scratch, and provide all of its customers, wherever they are in the U.S., with E911 service.
In that amount of time, Vonage worked with local 911 centers, also known as Public Safety Answering Points, across the country to turn on E911.
"In less than a week, we have equipped an additional 130 PSAPs with 911 capabilities," said Jeffrey A. Citron, Vonage's Chairman and CEO. "This means that today more than one-third of the nations PSAPs are now receiving Vonage emergency 911 service."
Citron vowed to work with the FCC, regulators, Congress and public safety "until every PSAP across the nation is equipped with E911."
According to a recent study, Global Positioning System receivers are poised to play an increasing role in wireless communications as a result of the United States Federal Communications Commission's E911 directive and location based services are expected to follow on the heels of the mandate.
Successful E911/LBS products and services will require solutions with features that can implement GPS in mobile telephones, according to analysis from Frost & Sullivan in the report "Strategic Analysis of GPS Chipset Market."
The study shows that the market earned revenue of $207 million in 2004 and estimates to reach $589.1 million in 2008.
In May VoIP provider Vonage said it would change its registration process to make 911 services an opt-out rather than an opt-in option.
On May 19 the FCC “unanimously voted to require carriers to provide emergency call centers the location and telephone number of callers who dial 911 from Internet phones and ensure that callers reach emergency dispatchers instead of nonemergency lines,” according to Reuters. The agency gave VoIP providers until late November to comply.
Citron said Vonage’s conversations with the Texas attorney general, who was mulling prosecution for Vonage's failure to provide E911, led him to believe that changing 911 from opt-in to opt-out was a way to make progress on resolving Texas’s issues with Vonage’s publicity material and business practices.
Since January 26th, Vonage has added more than 130 county PSAPs, bringing the total number of calling centers with emergency 911 service to over 2,400.
David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.
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