I have a bit of an issue with the ability to opt out of 911 service. I saw the efforts we went to make 911 calls from PBX's work in all situations. The problem is that most PBX's have dial 9 for outside service which means a person who is unaware that the phone they grabbed to call 911 in an emergency is a PBX extension OR even if they are aware of that, in an emergency they are likely to go off hook and dial 911 which only dials 11 after grabbing an outside trunk. Precious seconds lost in confusion in an emergency.
We set up PBX's to dial 911 on outside trunks no matter what convoluted attempt to call 911 was made from extensions. So now take this Google phone service that has NO ongoing monthly charge, just a dirt cheap one time charge. Even I would be tempted to avoid the hassle of signing up to get the ongoing 911 service in that scenario.
I pay 9 or 10 cents (Canadian) per month for Greater Vancouver E911 service on my Telco pots line so $1 US per month for 911 service through Google voice is quite simply an outrageous price that will dissuade even more people from doing it. A typical scenario where countless $$$ millions are spent providing the E911 service but large numbers will opt out of the service to literally save a buck.
And finally, Something else that happens is that people have poor memories. A voip line us installed without 911 service because it is just an extra line to the main pots line. Some time goes by, before long the voip line is the main line being used without a review of the fact that there is no 911 service on it. Then at some point the decision is made to ditch the pots line and by then 911 service is nowhere near being on the radar. I have customers with monitored security systems who eliminate their phone lines AND ignore the trouble light on the keypad that appears soon afterwards and then they are mad at me when they discover they are paying for alarm monitoring that can't function! To me this is quite a similar situation to the no 911 situation except the alarm monitoring problem actually created a "trouble light" warning that was STILL ignored.
Off my soap box now...John, I need your soap box to get off of!
Just my view on what can go wrong and WILL go wrong and why some things really shouldn't be allowed. And I didn't even get into the likelihood of people moving their voip service from one location to another and doing nothing to update the 911 address info.
Terry
Terry,
What you are not factoring in is that e911 is based on POTS telephones, not VOIP , threfore it is higher cost to implement it in VoIP . $1 dolar a month compared to what you pay to your Telco is probably a pittance, regarless of how they break it down to you.
Also rates are structured differently in Canada than in the USA . Take a look at VoIP calling rates at Les.net, voip.ms or rapidvox.com you will see that the cost of a call is less to canada than the USA . You may also note that the cost of a DID (incoming number) is more in Canada than in the USA , normally.
BTW for you Canadians, have a look at freephoneline.ca . this will allow you to get a phone line with many calls to much of Canada. It will only work on a softphone but you can pay them for an unlock key and install it in an ATA or asterisk. The cost last I checked came out to a one time fee equivalent to about 59.00 USD . That is not bad and as I recall they alsoi GIVE you Canadian e911 included .
Now I have an asterisk PBX (no '9' or other prefix for outside calls) and do business with a lot of Canadians. A freephoneline account would be great for me to use on my asterisk PBX in conjunction with Google voice. Google Voice gives me all of Canada to call but freephoneline would give me a canadian number showing to Canadian destinations (at least major cities) . if you are in Canada with a canadian address , use the freephoneline.ca 911 service and Canada based 800 calling which is not the same as USA based 800 calling.
I do happen to already have a Canadian number for Canadian clients and it is based in Vancouver , but it does cost me a few dollars per month , so according to my math after about 18 months the freephoneline.ca unlock key will have paid for itself in comparison to buying the stand-alone DID every month.
Of course you could have a HT502 with Google Voice and Freephoneline and I think you can probably work some dialplan fu to always force the 911 calls to go out via freephoneline regarless of the selected line. Pretty sure this works on Linksys/Sipura/Cisco ATAs at least.
Mark
