New VoIP E911 Law gets Signed, Praised

Doug Mohney — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:03:26 -0400

Signed into law by President Bush last week, the "New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008" is winning praise from Vonage and others.

The new law seeks to ensure phone calls made through VoIP get the same access and protections as other carriers when hooking into 911 services, including rights of interconnection, as a commercial mobile service. States can also collect fees for 911 or E911 services from VoIP service providers so long as those fees don't exceed those imposed upon subscribers of other services.

Vonage is happy because carriers now have to treat them as an equal, while the VON Coalition gets a national plan for a "next generation" 911 system using VoIP and other technologies to provide lots of bells and whistles for emergency communications.

Of course, there's the little matter that about 50 percent of U.S. counties, boroughs and parishes do not have E911 capabilities.

For more:
- FCW.com new VoIP E-911 law report

Related articles:
The ultimate E911 compliance test: Dial
911 bill passes House

VoIP as Evidence

Doug Mohney — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:44:49 -0400

"What you say may be used against you in a court of law" has a most interesting twist when it comes to VoIP.

New York Law Journal delves into the legal implications of VoIP for corporations. A VoIP network may "unexpectedly" create a substantial quantity of stored information that could become the target of a discovery request. Add in how voice messages can be stored under a unified communications/unified messaging system, then backed up and there's plenty of room for an inquisitive and tech-savvy legal team to go digging.

Call recording also makes life interesting. Contact centers routinely record conversations for quality assurance purposes and analytics processing. Regulatory requirements in the financial and health care industries mandate call recording, so there's a lot of raw information being spooled out to hard disk.

However, processing through stored call information may not be trivial. Searches may be limited to caller ID information, recipient and date and time of call, but more sophisticated data mining to process speech requires someone to pick up the tab. Speech-to-text may provide a more rapid way to skim through massive amounts of audio data rather than the classic but cumbersome method of listening calls and/or having them transcribed for search.

For more
- New York Law Journal discusses legal implications of VoIP

Related article:
VoIP Befuddles Lawful Intercept

Legal Implications

New VoIP E911 Law gets Signed, Praised

VoIP as Evidence