I think the final nail in this coffin is the Vonage banner ad/masthead which describes them as "the broadband phone company."
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 ;) What all this really shows is just how outdated the regulatory framework really is.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) ***** The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential, proprietary, and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers. 117