Here is a great post from Tim Denton on how we can solved the VoIP 911 problem. Excerpt:

Today, when you purchase a local telephone service from an incumbent local exchange carrier (i.e. ILECs, e.g. Bell Canada, TELUS, Verizon, SBC, etc.) emergency telephony comes with it. Should you wish to purchase from them an emergency-only telephony service, you are politely forced to take the local telephone service that comes with it as well.

Today, both services are bundled and provided over the same infrastructure by the ILECs.

Competitors are now unfortunately in the same position than in 1996 now that the ILECs have moved the target once again to triple play, that is emergency telephony, voice, video and television over the same infrastructure,

It is thus now apparent that the revenues generated from telephone and DSL services provided from co-location cages and over unbundled loop departing from the central-office will be too little to be able to compete against the services provided by the ILECs from fiber-to-copper conversion equipment located much closer to the subscribers.

After being burned once with co-location in the central offices, it is not surprising to see competitors being reluctant to begin deploying equipment in the field that is connected to ILEC loops intercepted at the ILEC outside plant patch panels.

However, this is unfortunately the way that facilities-based competition needs precisely to go as there is no way to provide emergency telephone service over a fiber to the home (FTTH) infrastructure.

There are 2 issues here - 9-1-1 emergency service and uninterrupted power availability.  They are somewhat related but can be considered individually.  Obviously, when the power is out and you have an emergency, you need both of these at the same time.  Separately, however, the 9-1-1 emergency service is the most important.  The uninterrupted power availability is less important.  We must understand, however, that not even the power companies provide reliable, uninterrupted power availability and we all live with this. Evidence is that both the telcos and the cablecos are now involved in providing substandard emergency telephony services where neither the telephones,  nor the customer modem, are  powered from the network.

Tim suggests that 911 be unbundled from the ILECs control and this makes sense to me. I also subscribed to this blog today as it seems like a great read.