On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, David M. Dowdle wrote:

If Pepsi put a chain-link fence up around every Coca-Cola vending machine in your city, do you think the authorities would do something about it?

Give me a break, this is totally different. This ISP is not blocking ports on other ISPs networks, they are choosing what they allow on their network or not. Just like other networks have done with many other things.

Worse, in this case, there's laws that say you MUST be able to get diet soda (911 calls) at all times.

Hhehe, actually in this case there are NOT laws that say you must be able to reach 911 at all times. Sure their are people that are trying to make it that way and as a VoIP provider we are trying to get as close to lifeline as we can, but frankly we don't ship a UPS with every ATA. We don't protect the last line IP network. So I am sorry, no we can't offer 911 calls to our customers at all times. In fact because of the lame way current providers are doing 911 (hading calls to PSAP administration lines) BroadVoice does not offer 911 at all yet. I would rather NOT offer it and tell users to have a way to call 911 via CELL or PSTN then to have them count on me getting them to a PSAP with the current options.

<> Nathan Stratton BroadVoice, Inc. nathan at robotics.net Talk IS Cheap http://www.robotics.net http://www.broadvoice.com