RE: Vonage Selects TCS For VoIP E911 Service

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

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.

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