--- Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com> wrote:
thegameiam@yahoo.com (David Barak) writes:
anecdote: one of my good friends uses Vonage, and my wife complained to me yesterday that she has a very hard time understanding their phone conversations anymore. She correctly identified the change in quality as originating from the VoPI.
as long as she's getting what she's paying for, or getting the cost savings that go along with the drop in quality, and is happy with the savings, then this isn't a bug.
Well, here's the catch - it wasn't the VoIP subscriber who was complaining, it was the PSTN subscriber. The experience left her with the opinion that VoIP = bad quality voice. I suspect you'll see a lot of this...
unfortunately a lot of companies who use voip or other forms of "statistical overcommit" want to pocket the savings and don't want to disclose the service limitations. that gives the whole field an undeserved bad smell.
agreed.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but your implication seems to be "damn the 911, full steam ahead." That's great for optional voice (calls to Panama) but not so good for non-optional voice (to the fire dept).
i'm not especially tolerant of governments telling me how safe i have to be. if i want a 911-free phone in my house then the most the gov't should be allowed to require is that i put a warning label on my front door and on anthing inside my house that looks like a phone.
occam's razor? We have government regulations regarding things which look like (and function similarly to) light switches, no? We have government regulations regarding the nature of water and sewer pipes, why not regulations regarding the nature of data pipes?
most american PBX's don't have 911 as a dialplan. you have to dial 9-911.
We work on different PBXes. The ones on which I work are specifically configured to respond to 911 OR 9-911 to avoid a problem. Would YOU want to have been the person who didn't enable one of those options, and thus delayed response time? < snip regarding corporate bad behavior in configuring PBXes>
geez, where's the FCC when you need 'em, huh?
actually, yes - I see this as a public safety issue, not a freedom issue. It is in the public's interest for 911 to work the way we expect it to, everywhere.
i think the selective enforcement here is sickening, and that if old money telcos can't compete without asset protection, they should file for chapter 11 rather than muscling newcomer costs up by calling these things "phone" and then circling their wagons around the NANP.
But VoIP companies calling their product a "communications service" and saying that they're exempt from 911 regulation, and at the same time beating up the ISPs for deprioritizing their traffic based on the same 911 access is completely fine, huh? Voice is an application, but a gov't regulated one. In this regard it is fundamentally different from email or ftp.
but that's not going to happen, so i predict that the internet will do what it always does-- work around the problem. so, domain names and personal computers rather than "phone numbers" and things-that-look-like-phones.
<snip>
and when 20% or 50% of the homes in a region lack this service because the people who live in those homes don't want to pay a POTS tithe, we'll see some interesting legislation come down, and you can quote me on that.
Yes, I'm certain we will. The legislation will likely be due to a particularly bad fire during a power outage or some other event which makes national news. David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Personals - Better first dates. More second dates. http://personals.yahoo.com