Emergency services access has been a long time problem for pure play voip players. The ability of properly locating customers calling emergency services, or lack thereof, has prevented voip providers from implementing this service. EU policy makers now seek to regulate this situation by mandating emergency services access for voip providers.

Industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, Intel and Skype now formed the Voice on the Net Coalition Europe to try and educate EU regulators about the differences between regular telephony and Voice over IP telephony. Stating that additional regulations will prevent innovation in this “new” technology.

Fact is, that for VoIP to become a mainstream alternative for traditional telecommunications, VoIP providers will need to offer the same services as traditional players do. In order to allow for both innovation and emergency access it is my opinion that the focus needs to be shifted towards internet access providers. If internet providers are forced to pass on the location of their customers to licensed VoIP players, it will become next to trivial for VoIP players to pass this information on to emergency services centers.

It is of great importance that this solution requires the least amount of red tape possible, and that internet access providers are obliged to use open, but secure, standards to transfer this information to VoIP providers. If licensed VoIP players get fast and easy access to the location of an IP address of one of their customers, no one can really object that emergency services access is made mandatory.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 14:26 CET and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.