On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Daniel Senie wrote:

use the customer's billing address, attempt to determine location based on IP address or some other voodoo? It'll be interesting to see if they

If you look at the webpage of telecomsystems (http://www.telecomsys.com) they state that their platform is GPS based. I see no other way of doing this reliably than to put some kind of GPS device into the VoIP unit. Article regarding indoor GPS and other locator service. <http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=3053> If you can put a locator into a cellphone, I see no reason why you cannot do the same in a VoIP unit. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Owen DeLong wrote:

Just because you can does not mean it is a good idea. I like being able to have a phone that cannot be accurately located. I won't be buying any VOIP products that can.

Then I guess you should talk to FCC and ask them to lighten the demands on the VOIP operators to provide that service. Btw, since the demand is the same for mobile phones, I guess most mobiles sold in the US will have a locator chip, if they don't already? Do you know what your mobile phone is telling others about you? This issue is a typical conflict of interests between security and privacy. Obvisouly a large part of the population likes the security and is less concerned about privacy in this case (at least judging from the polls that were presented on the webpage I references in my last post). -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se

At 02:48 AM 7/19/2005, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Daniel Senie wrote:

...

use the customer's billing address, attempt to determine location based on IP address or some other voodoo? It'll be interesting to see if they

If you look at the webpage of telecomsystems (http://www.telecomsys.com) they state that their platform is GPS based.

I see no other way of doing this reliably than to put some kind of GPS device into the VoIP unit.

While I agree that GPS is the likely answer, I wasn't expecting the ability to work inside computer rooms and basements. Guess based on the following article that it's possible. So, I guess we'll be seeing Vonage replacing the Cisco ATA-186's with something that does GPS. I suppose a downside is folks using the Vonage boxes outside the US via VPN will be traceable by Vonage and could get shut down, if Vonage wanted to enforce such.

Article regarding indoor GPS and other locator service.

<http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=3053>

If you can put a locator into a cellphone, I see no reason why you cannot do the same in a VoIP unit.

VOIP units don't walk near windows or outdoors, but given the claims made in the article, I guess it'll be possible. Perhaps some nice inexpensive NTP sync hardware will come out of this too. If the chips will work in the environments they list, perhaps they'll also work in data centers, if all the tweaks discussed don't affect clock sync accuracy too much.

At 6:45 PM +0200 2005-07-19, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

I think the ground based radio transmitters needed for indoor operation isn't around much outside the US. I was very surprised when I got a cellphone-based GPS navigator from AVIS last time I was in the US, and it started working inside the terminal building.

I had one of those, too. It was a Nextel phone. However, I don't believe those use actual GPS signals. I believe those are actually using triangulation from the cell phone towers (e.g., Time Difference of Arrival, Angle of Arrival, and/or Enhanced Observed Time Difference). They aren't as accurate as GPS, but they will give you reasonably accurate position information anywhere you can get a decent cell phone signal. I have heard about new highly accurate/low-cost single-chip clocks that would help improve accuracy of cell phone tower triangulation, and would hopefully also be something that could be put in standard desktop and laptop computers, making it much easier to run software such as NTP to keep the system clocks much closer to the correct time. -- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

...

I see no other way of doing this reliably than to put some kind of GPS device into the VoIP unit.

While I agree that GPS is the likely answer, I wasn't expecting the ability to work inside computer rooms and basements.

It doesn't need to work in basements, etc. It only needs to keep a record of the last location it was at when the signal faded away. The emergency service vehicles probably can't get any closer than that anyway. --Michael Dillon

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Andre Oppermann wrote:

To sum it up: Using GPS to geo-locate VoIP phones or adapters is broken by design.

No, it isn't. Relying on satellite connectivity to do so broken, but that's not how it works anymore. Did you even read the article regarding indoor GPS that I posted earlier in the thread? -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se

It doesn't need to work in basements, etc. It only needs to keep a record of the last location it was at when the signal faded away. The emergency service vehicles probably can't get any closer than that anyway.

In the US, that might be true, but, I'm betting that could be very wrong in places like London. I'm betting the station where you boarded the Tube could be a LONG way from where you make the 911 call. Owen -- If this message was not signed with gpg key 0FE2AA3D, it's probably a forgery.

Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:

...

In the US, that might be true, but, I'm betting that could be very wrong in places like London. I'm betting the station where you boarded the Tube could be a LONG way from where you make the 911 call.

There are very few places in the underground tube system where you can make calls on your mobile. Outside central London where the tube runs aboveground I would expect that GPS reception would be available wherever mobile reception is available, after all the tube trains have lots of windows.

This is unlikely. GPS reception is usually determined by sight of horizon. For example the navigation system in my car has trouble from time to time spotting enough GPS satellites when I'm driving in the inner city of Zurich. It keeps itself updated by compass and tracking the movements/velocity of the car. If a car mounted GPS has trouble keeping up with GPS in a city I highly doubt that a small mobile phone without any line of sight at all would be able to get any meaningful GPS signal reception. The low number of active GPS satellites and their concentration over the middle east don't help getting accuracy and reception higher up in US and EU. The new EU system called Galileo has a larger number of satellites planned which makes chances higher to have a number of the in sight all the time. On top of that it is 20 years further in technology refinement than GPS. OTO it ain't there yet and any speculation on how good it will be is moot until we can see ourselfs. -- Andre

Perhaps the tube wasn't the best example, although, I remember making cell calls from places in stations I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten GPS coverage. In any case, the fundamental assumption that detailed location information for e911 on every phone or phone-like capability is desirable is, in my opinion, flawed. I understand why the police-state zealots at places like the FBI want it, but, I'm not sure why network operators are so anxious to solve this problem. Personally, I'm perfectly happy that my laptop and it's SIP soft-phone aren't location traceable at all times. Owen

Forget defeat, just look at the normal margin of error... Forget fixed-line services, location is easy to solve for that. Let's look at things like a guy sitting on a mountain top with a BBQ grill antenna, and amp, and a WiFi card. I could make VOIP calls from Apple's public Wireless network from 25 miles away on top of Loma Prietta if I wanted to. (In fact, I did once, just to test it). If someone put a wireless bridge up there, then, I could make the same call from downtown Monterey. The first IP device would still be in Cupertino. I'd be in a different county (at least 2 counties away), in a different LATA, and, in completely different CHP dispatch zones. Even CDF would expect me to be talking to a different dispatch center. Doing this right is not only hard, but, it's also just not that desirable in my opinion. It's a huge invasion of privacy as far as I'm concerned. Owen --On July 20, 2005 3:19:41 PM -0500 Shane Owens <shaneowens@dna-communications.com> wrote:

Why not standardize this across the board for all access devices? As an example if my Broadband provider was required to enter location information in my cable modem so that when I connected a VOIP device (ATA, IAD, PC, etc) it would query the first IP device it encountered and gather location data that would solve a lot of these problems. Any solution can be circumvented so no solution will be perfect, but this idea seems easy enough to accomplish with existing technology. It would even fix the VPN connection issue, unless the user was purposefully trying to obfuscate himself in which case I don't think we are necessarily concerned about his ability to contact emergency services.

Shane

-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 7:22 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service

<snip> Maybe we should lobby government to require Wi-Fi access point manufacturers to include location information in their devices. After that, the VoIP operators and the Wi-Fi access operators should be able to sort out some protocol for sharing the location info.

Welcome to the 21st century! They never said it was going to be easy.

--Michael Dillon

-- If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.

Well... It will be most amusing if the 911 dispatchers start a deluge of calls and letters asking the FCC "What the hell were you idiots thinking?" when they realize what the FCC has done here. It's a bad rule on the FCC's part showing they don't understand the technology and think that VOIP is just TPC/IP (The Phone Company over Internet Protocol). I hope it doesn't kill anyone, but, other than that likely outcome, I gotta say it will serve them right. Owen --On Monday, July 18, 2005 23:07 -0400 Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com> wrote:

At 09:06 PM 7/18/2005, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:

...

http://www.advancedippipeline.com/166400372

Interesting. No ability to opt-out, and no signup option. So will they use the customer's billing address, attempt to determine location based on IP address or some other voodoo? It'll be interesting to see if they manage to handle vonage boxes that are connected over VPN tunnels that terminate far from where the IP addresses "appear" to be. Also, Vonage promotes the "take your phone service with you" idea, so there's a real opportunity for problems. This should be interesting to watch.

-- If this message was not signed with gpg key 0FE2AA3D, it's probably a forgery.

At 4:19 PM -0700 2005-07-20, Steve Gibbard wrote:

At some point it makes sense to solve the problems you can solve, rather than inventing new ones.

True enough. However, the tough problems are always the ones you never thought of before you started building the system. Therefore, it helps to try to come up with as many scenarios as you can, and try to find the various weaknesses in the system. You might decide to not try to do anything to fix them, but you should at least be aware of them. For example, one example came to me tonight -- get a CDMA mobile phone with EV-DO and a flat-rate subscription, then run a SIP/VOIP softphone over that. Yes, the cost of the EV-DO flat rate is high, but a few short duration long distance calls per month could very easily exceed the monthly rate you'd pay. And in times of trouble, people frequently grab the device they're most familiar with, and not necessarily the right one for the job at hand. In the case of regular cell phones, if you are roaming on a network in a foreign country, or you have rented a local phone, I understand that the carriers have gotten together and made sure that the various 911/112/999 emergency services numbers work world-wide, so that if you're an American in Europe, you can still call 911 and have that work as expected. But in the case of the EV-DO softphone, things get nastier. And I can see companies deciding to go with a dedicated EV-DO softphone, to save on overall expenses. -- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:20:07 +0000 (UTC) abuse@cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) wrote:

Given that there are UK telephone numbers starting 911

When I worked with Oftel on the design of the new UK numbering schemes, one of my strongest recommendations was for certain prefixes, including 911, to be ringfenced from all local numbering schemes - for exactly the reasons that you are now pointing to. Sadly Oftel were never known for their ability to understand reasoned argument within the technical arena ... A current, and related, problem is the introduction of emergency SMS messaging from cellphones ... a very necessary feature for deaf people to use, where they cannot access a text/relay service (eg when they are in a foreign country) Of course, the design of GSM predicates that such messages will go to the message center in their home country, and as things stand would be routed from there to the home country emergency services, regardless of where in the world the user actually is! -- Richard

Martin Hepworth <martinh@solid-state-logic.com> wrote:

Peter Corlett wrote: [...]

...

AFAIAA, Magrathea don't offer access to 112/999, but this is no great loss given that mobile phones are cheap, ubiqitous, and work pretty much everywhere in the UK. Even hermits have them :) Given the recent London experience should mobiles be used as a backup to proper land lines..??????

112/999 takes priority over regular calls. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that calls to 999 from mobiles were any more prone to failure than those from landlines. -- Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. - Quentin Crisp

...

world-wide, so that if you're an American in Europe, you can still call 911 and have that work as expected.

Given that there are UK telephone numbers starting 911, this seems rather unlikely.

Given that we're talking about cell phones, it seems completely likely. Cell phones present the dialed number as a block, so there's no ambiguity between 911 and 911XXXXX. I don't know whether UK cell carriers map 911 to 112, but there's no technical reason they can't do so. I agree that for VoIP using normal phones through adapters, 911 in the UK won't work.

At 9:55 AM +0000 2005-07-25, Peter Corlett wrote:

<rant> And why should the UK change its numbering system just because a few dumb Yanks who can't be bothered to learn local customs? Does 999 get through to the emergency services in the NANP? Does 112 work on non-GSM phones? How about Australia's 000? </rant>

It would be nice if everyone in the world could agree on a single "emergency services" number, which would work when dialed from all types of communication devices. However, that's a standards issue that would need to be addressed by the ITU. Until then, we've got what we've got, and I don't see much in the way of operational relevancy here. -- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

At 1:18 PM +0200 2005-07-25, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

What should happen instead is that everywhere, the most common ones are made to work as additional CNAMEs for the local one.

That doesn't work. As has already been demonstrated, there are numbers elsewhere in the world with 999 as their area code or local prefix, and I'm sure the same is true for 112, 911, and all the various other "emergency services" numbers. It's simply not possible to take all the various local numbers around the world and make them work globally as CNAMEs for whatever local area you may be in. There's no sense in hoping for something that you know is completely impossible. It's a waste of your time and effort, and mine. What might possibly be achievable is to take a single number that is universally available without conflicts, or where conflicts would be least painful to resolve, and make that work everywhere -- being made the equivalent of a CNAME for whatever the appropriate local area you may be in.

This whole "single number" hype should end anyway. 10 years ago the Dutch phone company had at least five different numbers: for b2c sales, b2b sales, outages, billing and so on. Now they only have one number but you have to waste time navigating through a "voice response" maze. That's not what I call progress.

That's a failure in their IVR design, yes. However, just because you can create badly designed IVR systems does not necessarily mean that all IVR systems should be outlawed. Just because you can create badly designed web pages doesn't mean that all web pages should be outlawed. Likewise with emergency services numbers. They need to be well-designed, yes. But they needn't be outlawed unversally just because some people are incompetent and cannot create one that works properly. However, as I previously alluded to, these are long-term standards issues that would first need to be worked out with the ITU before there could possibly be any operational issues to be resolved. -- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

Anyway, my point being: the current numbers have been drilled into our subconscious very effectively. Throwing that away woulde be an amazing waste of time and money.

Would it? Are humans that difficult to teach? Is all advertising a waste of time?

This whole "single number" hype should end anyway.

In Russia it is simple, there are three numbers: 01 - Fire Service 02 - Police 03 - Ambulance/Medical response Easy to remember especially because the number is written in large figures on the side of every emergency response vehicle. You could even retrofit these numbers into other countries because they are two digit numbers. Although Russia has agreed to implement 112 emergency dialling, the old numbers are still active nationwide. --Michael Dillon

On Monday 25 Jul 2005 10:55 am, Peter Corlett wrote:

Does 112 work on non-GSM phones?

In most of Europe dialing 112 on any phone on a public phone network, mobile or fixed, should get you an emergency operator. I think in some parts of Europe it may still get you the police, instead of a choice of emergency services, but in most cases that is sufficient, and a damn site better than wondering what the local emergency number is, or trying to decipher the explanation on a public phone box. Whether you'll be able to make yourself understood once connected is another issue entirely. My only concern is the UK government persists in teaching the old (local) 999 number, to avoid confusing the terminally stupid who can't cope with the idea of remembering two emergency numbers. As a result UK citizens end up either not knowing what to dial when abroad, or having to remember which country they are in when dialing for help.

At 1:42 PM +0200 2005-07-25, Peter Dambier wrote:

But dont try that when you are mobile. If you happen to be in "death valley" where you can reach only the wrong centre then they will hang up and dont even answer next time you try. That is at least what happened to me. I know people who had the same experience.

If they can't hand you off to a more appropriate center, then as far as I'm concerned they are committing manslaughter, and they should be prosecuted as such. If they are capable of handing you off but refuse to do so, then it's murder. However, I don't see that this is something we can resolve through the NANOG mailing list. -- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:09:11 -0000, Peter Corlett said:

If you don't even know what country you're in, I don't fancy your chances telling emergency services where you are...

"I blinked... Did we leave (Luxembourg / Andorra / Liechtenstein ) already?" :) (Sorry, I couldn't resist.... ;)

On 07/21/2005 09:32 AM, Joe Abley allegedly wrote:

On 20 Jul 2005, at 21:46, Brad Knowles wrote:

...

In the case of regular cell phones, if you are roaming on a network in a foreign country, or you have rented a local phone, I understand that the carriers have gotten together and made sure that the various 911/112/999 emergency services numbers work world-wide, so that if you're an American in Europe, you can still call 911 and have that work as expected.

Cite?

(This isn't my experience at all ...

My experience is that the mobile network operators (in Europe and the USA (GSM) anyway) are lumping all of these together, so that no matter which you dial, you get the emergency service they connect you to. They added to the list of "special" numbers, with a many-to-one mapping of number to service.

Even for fixed, US, residential VoIP, there's another problem: service availability. With cell phones, people expect dropped calls and sketchy service, and understand misrouted calls to local operators/emergency services. It's part of the deal. But a land line? If I pick up an analog phone anywhere, I expect a dial tone, and local calling. If I don't have access to emergency services after a blackout/natural disaster that knocks cell towers down (think hurricane season in Florida last year) then you'd never get me to drop my local carrier. I Am Not a Telco Engineer, BUT: What if part of your monthly VoIP service included a stripped down, leased PSTN line from the carrier? Say, another 2 bucks a month. What's the opex of a single residential phone line? How much does it cost to have a live copper pair, and how much does it cost to connect said copper to the PSTN? Could local telcos offer nothing but emergency local dialing? Say, 911, hospitals, sheriff's office? Or maybe just local dialing, with a "by the minute" rate to discourage use? Since most residential customers use their ATA's to mimic a single analog line for the whole house anyways, why not add an FXO port to the ATA? Set the ATA to fail over to the analog line if it loses power. Customers get *real* 911 service, and telcos won't be stuck with miles of worthless, buried line. This solves the "babysitter" problem, too: people who don't care how your VoIP setup works; they just expect 911 to do what it's supposed to. Austin Steve Gibbard wrote:

I don't know all that much about commercial VOIP service or GPS, but it seems to me I've just read lots and lots of messages citing weird cases where locating a VOIP phone won't work well as evidence that the whole idea is a failure, while none of those cases appear to have much to do with the problem that people have been trying to solve. The end result of this is that a bunch of people who have loudly written the problem off as impossible then start loudly complaining that those working on the problem didn't ask them how to do it.

The basic problem, if I understand correctly, is this: For the last several years, anybody picking up phone installed in a reasonably standard way and calling 911 could expect that if weren't able to explain where they were, the police would show up anyway. It was hard to see this as espionage or as a civil liberties violation -- the wire goes where the wire goes.

Now we've got competition among providers of wire line residential phone service, and the competitors are mostly VOIP companies who provide their service over the users' cable modems. Since this service is being marketed as equivalent to regular home phone service, and used that way by lots of its customers, it seems reasonable to expect that calling 911 from it would work the same way. There's a minor problem -- the VOIP carrier often doesn't provide the wire, and thus doesn't know where the wire goes -- but that seems easy enough to get around. The simplest way to do it would be to ask two questions when the service gets installed: Is it going to be used in a fixed location, and if so, where? Asking the same questions again whenever the billing address changes should keep this reasonably up to date.

There are, of course, other ways to do this, which might also work. Whether GPS in the ATA box will work has already been discussed to death here. Requiring the cable or DSL providers to map IP addresses to installed locations would presumably also work, although with many more layers of complexity to go through to have useful information accompany a phone call. Anyhow, I'm sure if we leave those questions to those who have to implement it, they'll figure out something that doesn't require too much completely extraneous work on their parts.

There are, of course, VOIP installations where this won't work. I use a VOIP soft phone through a gateway in San Francisco to call the US from countries where using my US cell phone is expensive, and there are plenty of other people who use VOIP phones in much the same way. Owen maybe isn't quite unique in his bizarre scenario of trying to hide his location by using his wi-fi phone via repeaters from two counties away from the base station. But these scenarios aren't at all relevant to the problem at hand. If I need urgent help in a hotel room in a foreign country, I'll grab the hotel phone and call somebody local rather than trying to patch a call through to the US via my computer. And if Owen were to die because he deliberately hid his location when calling 911 and the ambulance couldn't find him, it would be hard to argue that it would be anybody's fault but Owen's.

At some point it makes sense to solve the problems you can solve, rather than inventing new ones.

Yes, this ignores the cell phone issue, which seems rather different because they're almost always portable. It's already had years of work put into it, and doesn't need to be reinvented here.

-Steve

Crist Clark wrote:

<Gratuitous-Plug=Employer> If you really want high reliability during and after a natural disaster, satellite phones are probably your best option.

That's who I thought you worked for, but the only satellite phone provider whose name I consistently remember is Iridium (aren't they bankrupt and/or gone?) Of course, you have issues with satellite phones too. Cost is one such issue. Even when I signed up for my first cell phone in 1993, long before the wireless boom, airtime was still only about 40 to 50 cents per minute[0] - about 1/2 or 1/3 of what you'll pay per minute for a satellite phone today, IIRC. (Please correct me if necessary!) Another, potentially worse, problem occurs if you don't have line of sight to the bird... that's precisely why I ended up with cable TV instead of satellite when I lived in Lake County, Ohio - three *very* tall trees to the south of my house, with DirecTV's satellite *and* Dish's satellite both requiring line of sight to the southwest.

during hurricane season. (Although I'd rather not slide into the discussion about how 911 works for us.)

It doesn't? ;) **SJS [0] All monetary figures quoted here are in US dollars -- Steve Sobol, Professional Geek 888-480-4638 PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Company website: http://JustThe.net/ Personal blog, resume, portfolio: http://SteveSobol.com/ E: sjsobol@JustThe.net Snail: 22674 Motnocab Road, Apple Valley, CA 92307

Austin McKinley <aumckinl@cisco.com> wrote: [Well, OK, so I'm being UK-centric, but the same problems apply.]

What's the opex of a single residential phone line? How much does it cost to have a live copper pair, and how much does it cost to connect said copper to the PSTN?

If BT is to be believed, slightly *more* than the retail cost of GBP10.49 a month. I assume that BT expect to recover some of the loss through call charges or other services. (Not unreasonable - BT indirectly get a reasonable wedge from my ADSL supplier even if I don't pay more than the basic line rental.)

Could local telcos offer nothing but emergency local dialing? Say, 911, hospitals, sheriff's office?

Who would decide which numbers go onto the list. What about the 40p/min 070xx numbers that Patientline provide "free" to hospitals? (070xx is just a sleazy way of sidestepping premium-rate legislation of 09xx numbers.)

Or maybe just local dialing, with a "by the minute" rate to discourage use?

Us 10.49 customers pay 3p/min daytime anyway, whether local or to the other side of the UK :)

Since most residential customers use their ATA's to mimic a single analog line for the whole house anyways, why not add an FXO port to the ATA? Set the ATA to fail over to the analog line if it loses power. Customers get *real* 911 service, and telcos won't be stuck with miles of worthless, buried line.

It's not really worthless, as that's what the broadband comes in on for pretty much every UK broadband user. (Unlike BT, with NTL and Telewest you don't *have* to take the voice service, but the price breaks encourage you to and I suspect it gets installed anyway.) It seems that the status quo in the UK already gives you pretty much what you want. I guess that's why, wearing my end-user hat, I've seen absolutely no effort going on to make 999 work over VoIP. I think UK users of VoIP still view it as a way of getting dirt cheap voice minutes by avoiding BT's call rates, rather than as a replacement phone line. In that vein, would you expect, say, MCI and all the tinpot long-distance carriers to concern themselves with 911? -- Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink. - W.C. Fields