[78575] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Vonage service suffers outage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christian Kuhtz)
Thu Mar 10 14:06:19 2005
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:05:27 -0500
From: "Christian Kuhtz" <christian.kuhtz@bellsouth.com>
To: <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050310180552.62125.qmail@web14924.mail.yahoo.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
> I think the final nail in this coffin is the Vonage
> banner ad/masthead which describes them as "the
> broadband phone company."
>=20
> If they're going to claim to be a phone company, it's
> reasonable that phone company regulations regarding
> 911, outage reporting, etc should all apply to them.
But it's broadband! Shsssssh. It's an information service. It's IP. =
These
are not the packets you're looking for.
;)
What all this really shows is just how outdated the regulatory framework
really is. Once VoIP (or whatever the application formerly known as =
VoIP)
stops looking like a PSTN emulation, this will get only more absurd than =
it
already is.
So, what I'm saying is that it is silly to measure these issues by ill
fitting frameworks. So, please, lets not force this emerging technology =
to
look like PSTN even though it happens to right now. Does PSTN style =
outage
reporting even make sense for a voice application? I think you can =
argue
that it makes little operational sense nor provides much value for the
consumer.
IMHO, the real problem with 911 & VoIP isn't that VoIP breaks PSTN E911. =
It
is that 911 has not evolved to deal with mobility and is so PSTN =
centric.
Instead of evolving, we keep trying to fit a square peg into a round =
hole.
There's a whole ball of wax of location aware services (driven by an end
point and not the network) buried under it, not just E911. [One could =
argue
Vonage etc are doing nobody a favor by looking so PSTN'ish.. ;) ]
And we need to have a regulatory framework which encourages operators to
evolve, rather than locking them into a managed economy.
Regards,
Christian
PS: I only speak for myself, and I can't do jack squat about this silly
legal disclaimer below. (Thanks Randy)
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