Jack Decker writes:
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Wilber replies:
In your diatribe against "toady journalists" and "big phone companies" I saw no mention of the fact that the ILECs are bound by regulations and hampered by "universal service fees" and "E-911 fees" from which the VoIP providers are -- and demand to be -- exempt from. It is these fees that financed much of the telecommunications infrastructure and much, if not all, of the nationwide E-911 system.
[Moderator's comment: I'm not sure what "Universal Service Fees" have to do with this discussion, but I have said on several occasions that they amount to "corporate welfare", especially for the smaller (and often highly profitable) rural telephone companies, and they ought to be abolished across the board. I'd rather see the fact that VoIP companies don't pay them used as leverage to abolish these hidden taxes/handouts, rather than trying to put VoIP companies under this same rotten system. As for E-911 fees, I have been saying for many months now that the only fair way to finance E-911 centers is through the same mechanism used to finance every other emergency service in the community (such as fire and police), be that property taxes, local sales taxes, or whatever. There is nothing remotely fair about billing these fees on people's phone bills, because it deprives them of the ability to vote on whether they want these enhanced systems, and when people have multiple phone numbers (as is more and more common) they pay multiple E-911 fees even though their household may be the same size as before, and isn't using 911 any more frequently - meanwhile a large industrial facility with only a handful of phone numbers may not be paying its fair share at all!]Wilber notes further:
Furthermore, most of the E-911 systems currently in place cannot easily handle the processing of 911 calls from VoIP origins. Who should bear the burden of converting, modifying, upgrading or replacing those local systems? Wireline users or providers who have already been paying into the system for years to make it work while VoIP users remain exempt?
[Moderator's comment #2: In an ideal world, the phone companies that sold the 911 centers these technologically obsolete systems would be forced to pay. However, I suspect that if there were more sources for these systems -- that is, if 911 center operators didn't run to their partners in crime at the phone companies to purchase these systems at top dollar -- I suspect they could get far more advanced systems for far less money. In other words, I believe the phone companies may be DELIBERATELY selling systems to 911 centers that only work really well with wireline services. There is a conflict of interest there, but as I more or less said before, I think the 911 center administrators so love it that they can put one over on the taxpayers and voters (by not seeking their permission before installing a new system) that they don't really question what sort of deal the phone companies are giving them, nor whether the equipment they are being sold is expandable to handle communications from newer forms of technology. Again, I think 911 systems should be funded by taxpayers through normal taxation mechanisms, NOT through a surcharge on any type of communications, and if that were done the 911 center administrators might not feel so beholden to the phone companies and might shop around to get systems that are more easily upgradeable.]Wilber again:
Providers such as Vonage and others are quick to yell "foul" when they are taken to task for rushing a product to market without assuring that it provides the same level of safety the public already enjoys. They are even quicker to yell "unfair" when someone suggests that they be subject to the same regulation and fees that critical public communications providers have had to deal with for decades. It must be nice to have your cake and eat it too but few of us are able to pull it off.
[Moderator's comment #3: You conveniently ignore the fact that for many years cell phones were unable to complete calls to 911. Perhaps you feel that all new forms of communication should be hamstrung until they can fit into the wireline telephone companies' ways of doing things, but I for one do not. NO ONE is forced to buy VoIP service, but dammit, I think people should have the CHOICE to buy a product with a greater or lesser level of safety. This is supposed to be a free county (well, at least that is the lie we were brainwashed with in school) and if that were the least bit true, we'd give people the freedom to buy any product and let them make the decision whether any risks are acceptable, and that applies not only to telecommunications products but also to certain types of medicines and cancer cures that have been banned by the FDA (don't even get me started on that).Anyway, no industry has been better at having their cake and eating it too than the traditional telcos. For example, they built their networks using money taken from the ratepayers when people had no choice as to providers, and they set their poles on public rights-of-way, and then they have the unmitigated gall to claim it's all theirs and they shouldn't have to share it with competitors. Of course had they not had their government-enforced monopoly all these years, there would have probably been viable competition 50 years ago and no one would have monopoly bottleneck control on the pair of phone wires coming into a home. VoIP, which still has a minuscule share of the market at the moment, is the one thing that can and will break that monopoly, and that is why we are getting all the telco-inspired propaganda crap being fed to the press right now. But it will only happen if customers can freely choose VoIP, and that is why the incumbents are using every dirty trick at their disposal to try and eliminate or delay that choice.
As for my "diatribe", no one is forcing you to read anything I write and if you don't like what I write you can unsubscribe from VoIP News anytime. I apologize if it sounds like I'm being short, but I really have lost my patience with people who cannot see that the incumbent telcos are staging a massive effort, probably via their public relations firms and their "astroturf" consumer groups (and PLEASE educate yourself on what an astroturf group is!), to make VoIP look bad and even dangerous. But VoIP is no worse than cell phone service was in the early years, and the only reason you didn't see this sort of propaganda against cell phones was because the big phone companies were in that from the beginning. Now it comes out (in some European studies) that cell phone radiation may be dangerous to the brain, but do you hear a peep out of anyone about that in this country? No, we can make a big deal out of the fact that some guy in Texas couldn't be bothered to activate his 911 service, but there is zero concern for all the teenagers that are possibly going to develop brain tumors in
20 or 30 years because of their extensive cell phone use today. As soon as the big phone companies think they are competitive in the VoIP market, suddenly VoIP will be the best thing since sliced bread. -Jack]Charlie Wilber New Hampshire
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