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Internet Phone Services Told to Offer 911 Emergency Calls Companies that deliver telephone service over the Internet must provide their customers with 911 emergency service, the Federal Communications Commission ruled yesterday in its first major action to regulate the emerging technology. The unanimous decision by the commission also requires the traditional Bell telephone companies to cooperate by opening the 911 networks, which they largely control, to Internet-based competitors. The F.C.C.'s decision underscores the spread and influence of Internet calling, a technology that is used by merely two million Americans but that some industry executives and analysts say represents the future of voice telecommunications. The action followed several prominent cases of users of Internet telephones dialing 911 but being unable to reach an emergency operator. In Florida in March, a 3-month-old girl died after she stopped breathing and her mother, calling 911 from her Internet phone, reached an answering service. Kevin J. Martin, the F.C.C. chairman, said in a public statement yesterday that the issue is "one quite literally of life and death." The new rules should be in place within six months, the commission said. But 911 operators may still not know the location of some Internet callers, and their calls may not be routed to the proper 911 service, because the F.C.C. stopped short of forcing Internet telephone companies to track when customers move a phone from one location to another. To consumers, an Internet call seems just like a traditional one and can be made using a regular phone. The difference is that the voice signal is delivered over the Internet. This creates technological and bureaucratic challenges to the application of 911 service, which takes place on a dedicated network connected to the traditional telephone infrastructure. To get a 911 call from the Internet onto the traditional network requires the Internet provider to flag the call as an emergency one, then to connect it through the traditional network onto the dedicated emergency infrastructure. Finally, the call must be accepted by the Public Safety Answering Points, the roughly 6,000 locations where emergency operators are situated, which can have their own peculiar formatting and contractual requirements for taking calls. Until recently, several of the Bell operating companies have been reluctant to allow Internet competitors access to their networks, industry analysts and executives said. But Vonage, an Internet telephone company with 700,000 customers - the most in the industry - announced deals with SBC and BellSouth yesterday that will enable delivery of 911 calls through its infrastructure. Jeff Citron, Vonage's chief executive, said the company already had a similar deal with Verizon. He said the company expected to introduce 911 service as early as July in New York. The F.C.C. asserted in November that it had jurisdiction over Internet telephony, a point contested by some states, which argued they should be able to regulate the industry as they do traditional telephone service.
http://www.nytimes.com
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