BellSouth’s Smith: VoIP no miracle cure for Katrina

BOSTON--The telecom industry needs to be more careful in portraying VoIP as an alternative network technology in the event of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, BellSouth CTO Bill Smith reminded the VON ’05 audience in Boston Tuesday morning.

In VON keynote speeches by consultant Tom Evslin, VON founder Jeff Pulver and Vonage CEO Jeffrey Citron, much was made of the fact that New Orleans Mayor Ray Negrin was only able to contact the outside world, and receive a call from President Bush, because a staff member had a Vonage softphone on his laptop computer.

However, Smith told the audience, without electrical power, no alternative service is going to work for long, and most need to rely on the PSTN infrastructure at some point.

“VoIP is a wonderful thing, but it has to run on something,” he said. “The biggest problem [in the areas hit by Katrina] was power. Most VoIP equipment runs on power. It does a disservice to the industry to create an impression that VoIP can run under any conditions. It requires some fundamental infrastructure.”

BellSouth has handled some 22 hurricanes since Andrew blew across Florida in 1992, but has never seen anything like the damage done by Katrina.

Smith said in an interview following his speech that BellSouth is beefing up its voice mail capacity, putting lab systems into commercial use, to redirect the phone numbers of those displaced by Katrina to a voice mail system, so they would have a contact point for relatives as well as insurance companies and health care providers.

“For most people, the primary contact is the home phone number,” he said. “In Mississippi and parts of Louisiana, many of the homes are gone. In New Orleans, it isn’t clear when people will be able to return to their homes.”

Pulver reiterated Tuesday that the ability of VoIP to be an alternative service also depends on making sure service providers aren’t allowed to block ports in order to prevent access to non facilities-based VoIP services that operate over broadband connections.

“If the hotel the mayor was calling from was doing port blocking, then the call wouldn’t go through,” he said. “We got lucky.”

Businesses on VoIP would have a much easier time setting up shop elsewhere and automatically transferring their phone numbers to the new location, said Nancy Gofus, MCI senior vice president of IP services.

“It would be a matter of directing the calls to a new URL,” she said.

Instead, Linda Mills, vice president of IP, Voice and Data Services, for MCI, “every local switch has to be provisioned” to make the changes.

“It’s one of the biggest differences of moving to the Internet,” she said.