TMCnet's David Sims: A Better E-911

TMCnet columnist David Sims has posted an excellent summary of the snares and pitfalls confronting VoIP companies under government mandate to provide E-911 services to their customers.

Sims writes that rather than simply imitate Plain Old Telephone Service capabilities on the emergency service front, players in the VoIP space would like to have the breathing room to rethink the service, and provide further enhancements.

VoIPers...would like to run it through routers, and provide maps, photos and other cool stuff the current system doesn’t do but which is possible with VoIP. Note that there’s no government regulation requiring them to do so, because it’s not the nature of government to require ingenuity and technological advancement. That’s why business is business and government is government -- business creates new realities and government comes along afterwards with the pushbroom.

Government can require VoIP to provide E911 the old-fashioned way, or it can let VoIP come up with a better way.

He goes on to speculate that Nuvio's lawsuit against the FCC (about which IPInferno has posted previously) is tantamount to a delaying tactic to the industry can "create the better way of doing 911 before they have to waste a great deal of time and energy complying with the very system their technology has rendered obsolete."

Sims' points are echoed in another article on Internetnews.com