ON A CLEAR DAY

A lot of people saw the current fracas over VoIP and E911 coming from a long way off. “It'll only take one 911 call not going through for this to blow up,” was something I heard on multiple occasions. An argument can be made that Vonage, the company most impacted from the public relations fallout, saw it coming as well. They were upfront with customers about the E911 issue and the need for customers to actively register — this wasn't a case of consumer fraud or even neglect. It was more consumer indifference. The extent of the negative reaction to the first serious problems and the FCC's belated efforts in this area are a wake-up call for an industry that has convinced itself that ubiquitous cell phones and other means of communication have made the reliability of local phone service a moot point. It's something to remember when sloughing off the need for battery backup of local phone service provided over broadband, whether fiber, cable or DSL. Consumers may say it's no big deal — after all, their local phones are cordless anyway and subject to power outages. But the first time a hurricane wipes out electrical service and everyone in a fiber optic-fed neighborhood loses phone service, that's all going to change. And that's something we can see — and do something about — from here.