Reader Commentary on Texas-Vonage 911 Suit

Your article, "Texas AG to Lasso Vonage," of Mar 23 on tcmnet.com is the best I've seen so far of an otherwise horribly inaccurate slew of reports about the lawsuit filed by the apparently completely clueless Texas Attorney General.

First, of course, is that the AG's claim that Vonage fails to inform its customers about the differences between regular 9-1-1 and Vonage's 9-1-1 is utterly false. I found that Vonage explained it very well and very clearly, and that Vonage annoys users who have not activated the 9-1-1 workaround, with Web page and email reminders.

Second is that no reports, not even your good one, explain that most VoIP offered by third parties such as Vonage is *portable* and can be used anywhere in the world where sufficient bandwidth is available. Vonage has no way of knowing the location of any of the approximately ten Vonage units my associates and I use. One of my friends takes his Vonage unit to Ecuador to receive his Houston calls and to make calls to numbers in the U.S. When he is in Ecuador his Houston number rings there and his calls to U.S. numbers cost nothing. When we rent a suite in a nearby hotel here in Houston to demonstrate our computer technology to visiting prospects we bring a Vonage unit along and plug it into the hotel's broadband Internet. Our number rings in the hotel and we freely make calls at no additional cost throughout the U.S. and Canada and to international numbers at absurdly low rates.

For the reason that third party VoIP is location independent, Vonage does not activate its 9-1-1 service by default, because they would have no idea where to route the calls to serve the unknown location of the customer. Instead, they clearly explain how their 9-1-1 service differs from telco 9-1-1 and require the customer to activate Vonage 9-1-1 by identifying the service location and agreeing to be responsible for 9-1-1 calls Vonage routes to the normal emergency service number for the customer's declared location.

That VoIP is fundamentally different from traditional phone service seems to have escaped all the journalists reporting on this matter. That the difference is what gives rise to some of VoIP's unique benefits has also escaped them. Journalists at least have the excuse that they are traditionally behind the curve on technological matters. The Texas AG has no such excuse; it's his *job* to get it right.

The cable companies you mention that provide traditional 9-1-1 service probably only support their VoIP equipment when it is used at the customer's cable Internet service location, which is a severe, crippling drawback in this revolutionary world of inexpensive VoIP phone services. If we used such a service we would be unable to move our VoIP boxes around, take them to a hotel, take them on trips out of town, etc. I also note that the cable provider in my area, Time-Warner Road Runner, charges substantially more for their crippled VoIP service and we would never consider using it.

It's pretty clear to me that Texas AG Abbott is grandstanding, using the reported home invasion case as his springboard. When he says that he wants to make sure thay such a case never occurs again, he reveals his utter cluelessness, because VoIP companies such as Vonage can never know the locations of their customers' equipment to be able to handle true 9-1-1 even if they gain access to the 9-1-1 system. Abbott and his staff haven't done their homework. The only way Vonage could report true location to the correct 9-1-1 service would be to have GPS in the VoIP box and incredibly complex and error-prone databasing to correlate GPS coordinates with emergency service numbers and possible customer location addresses.

When Abbott says that he doesn't know how many Vonage customers are in Texas, he reveals that his political acumen is near zero. About 7% of U.S. households, or 8.5 million, are in Texas. With 500,000 customers, that means that Vonage probably has about 35,000 in Texas. With growth presently running at 15,000 new customer "lines" per week, that means that Texas is going to Vonage at the rate of about 10,000 per month. What the Texas AG seems to have failed to take into account is that those are VOTERS and that they are not likely to be amused by his attempted interference in the substantial cost savings and convenience they are enjoying as results of having moved to Vonage. Texas and particularly AG Abbott have really stepped in it this time.

Finally, what is the chance that this absurd action by the Texas AG is not merely one of carrying water for the Texas telcos? Zero, in my opinion. I see this lawsuit as a crass proxy attack on Vonage by the telco interests, which are no doubt very much better wired into Texas politics than are the out of state newcomers such as Vonage. I find the idea that the AG actually cares a whit about what happened to the family that suffered the home invasion laughable. He's a politician.

Regards,

Thomas Junker
Houston, TX

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AB -- 3/28/05