Plug telephones into the Internet, and the Internet into telephones, and users immediately take for granted that the result will somehow resemble conventional telephone service-reliable dial tone, good sound quality. and the ability to reach 911, have LEOs (law enforcement officers) eavesdrop on your calls and subpoena your records, and have your calls taxed and surcharged into competitive oblivion.
The good news and bad news of being taken seriously is that VoIP is increasingly becoming subject to regulations with which vendors, carriers and related parties must comply.
For 2005, the hot buttons have been E911, CALEA, and surcharges, more or less in that order. Here's a rundown on what's what, and a snapshot of where things are at the moment, keeping in mind that the ongoing status of these things often changes quickly.
Dial E (911, that is) for Emergency
As anybody who has watched any TV episode of Law & Order knows, if you're in an emergency situation and you've got a phone handy, you dial 911. Based on a quick lookup of the calling number to a database, the call goes to the appropriate PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point). (There are over 4400 PSAPs in the US at the city or county level.) If it's Enhanced 911 (E911) service, the emergency operator gets the calling number and your location flashed to them, expediting any emergency dispatch. Telcos know where their wired numbers are; so do cablecos. Cellcos can roughly figure it out. Where is a VoIP user? If they haven't previously registered with the location database, it's hard-to-impossible to know. a potential problem not every VoIP customer may be aware of.
"Enhanced 911 services have saved countless lives with their ability to instantly pinpoint a distressed callers' location so emergency services can respond immediately," notes Jeff Ahlquist, VP, product management and development, Covad Communications Group. "We recognized this when we launched Covad business-class VoIP service; making E911 a fundamental feature on every single one of our managed VoIP phone lines was crucial."
"For VoIP to be a successful service for consumers, they need to be able to reach 911. To deliver it to the customers, it's not just about VoIP providers providing it, but also being able to interconnect to the LECs," says Craig Rohde, executive director of the E911 Institute (www.e911institute.org), a two-year-old information clearinghouse whose mission is "to support the Congressional E9-1-1 Caucus and assist in promoting public education on E9-1-1 and emergency communications issues."
One piece of the solution is to require VoIP customers to provide their location as part of the registration process, as companies like Vonage do. (This doesn't address what happens if a user takes their VoIP box on the road, or uses a softphone, of course.)
But not every VoIP provider has done this-sometimes it's done by choice, but many times it's because of roadblocks. Providing E911 service includes connecting to the PSAP network, and pushing customer number/location data into the database. and the ILECs pretty much own the PSAPs and the databases.
Not surprisingly, the ILECs have not always been cooperative in providing access to their E911 services, including the ability for VoIPcos to provide entries to the customer database.
All this came to a head on May 19, 2005, when the Federal Communications Commission issued its order requiring VoIP to provide E911 functionality within 120 days: "The Order places obligations on interconnected VoIP service providers that are similar to traditional telephone providers in that they enable customers to receive calls from and terminate calls to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).". and, to make this doable:
"The incumbent LECs are required to provide access to their E911 networks to any requesting telecommunications carrier. They must continue to provide access to trunks, selective routers, and E911 databases to competing carriers."
For US VoIPcos, this is a major turning point. (See VON News Editor Doug Mohney's "E911-The FCC speaks," for more.)
This should help the US catch up. says the E911 Institute's Rohde, noting that "The Canadian regulatory bodies recently mandated that all VoIP companies in Canada provide 911 access."
Some VoIPcos and ILECs had already been working on the problem, not waiting to be ordered to. Back on April 26, 2005, Verizon announced that they would let VoIPcos use Verizon's E911 calling system to connect VoIP customers' 911 calls to PSAPs.
In the press release, Michael O'Connor, executive director of Federal Regulatory Affairs for Verizon, says, "Working with VoIP companies and their vendors, we have identified a means to route VoIP calls so that they appear in emergency response centers much the way wireline and wireless 911 calls do."
And the same day as the FCC announcement, Vonage announced they had added E911 agreements with BellSouth and SBC Communications, bringing Vonage's total to three of the four big US ILECs.
Third-Party Pieces of the E911 Puzzle
Some CLECs and ILECs handle their own 911-related data management. Those that can't can outsource it, e.g. to a company like Intrado Inc. (http://www.intrado.com).
Intrado, which has been in the 911 business for two-and-a-half decades, and currently serves companies including Vonage, VoiceWing and USA Datanet, was understandably pleased by the May 19 FCC announcement.
"We've got federal policy now that has allowed for cooperation of all parties involved in the delivery of 911, so we can deliver VoIP 911 calls into the voice network," says Mary Boyd, VP of Government Affairs, Intrado. "We always believed this was a policy the FCC had to address; [the May 19th FCC] meeting addressed that and gave it some direction. It's important that we recognize full cooperation among the PSAPs, ILECs, VoIP companies, and third parties. With full cooperation we can move forward, without it we can't."
While many saw the FCC ruling as major progress, others have concerns. For example, Brad Templeton (http://www.templetons.com/brad/), founder and publisher of ClariNet Communications Corp., and Chairman of the Board of the EFF (among many other things), noted the following in a message to Dave Farber's Interesting- People (IP) list (http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/): "It is important that the FCC E911/VoIP mandate not become a complete roaming tracking database on users, and that instead your location only be revealed when you wish it to. Indeed, even if you wish to call 911 without revealing your location, that should be possible."
Moreover, on his "Brad Ideas" blog (http://ideas.4brad.com/archives/-000203.html), he wrote the following: "The flaw in the E911/VoIP rules is that it assumes that because something looks like a telephone, it must be regulated like one. We want emergency services, and we want to make phone calls to them, but we might also just like panic buttons that summon the police or other things not yet invented."
Marching orders from the FCC don't by themselves solve the problem; there's still technical and business challenges ahead. But being ordered to work together will make a big difference.
CALEA: Can You Overhear Me Now?
For better or worse, be prepared for any calls you make, like any email you send, to be examined after the fact, for metadata such as where you called from and to, and, unless you've got Real Good Encryption, what you said, too. All courtesy of CALEA.
CALEA stands for "The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994." The purpose of CALEA, according to AskCalea (http://www.askcalea.net/calea.html) is "to preserve the ability of law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance in the face of rapid advances in telecommunications technology." This would include, for example, being able to get "callidentifying information" and/or "call content."
VoIPco's, like telcos, must comply.
"The ability to listen in and screen calls is part of the national security issue," according to Covad's Jeff Ahlquist. "We will support whatever CALEA regulations come out. We're not trying to position VoIP as a non-standard application that shouldn't be regulated. E911 and CALEA are critical parts in letting VoIP be seen as a true phone service replacement."
Other leading VoIPcos similarly stress their CALEA compliance. At Vonage, Brooke Schulz, senior vice president, Corporate Communications and Regulatory Affairs, says, "We do CALEA today; we have a deal with Verisign to allow law enforcement of- fices to legally intercept calls, and are implementing that solution, hopefully in the next quarter. We get subpoenas quite often for data." Should VoIP be CALEAable? "There are issues for Congress to resolve, their intent of the CALEA statue, regarding what electronic activities it does and doesn't apply to. So the intent of the law needs to be re-addressed by Congress and codified," says Schulz.
As with E911, complying is the trick. Given that, apparently, many companies carrying telecommunications can't even capture the data to do their own billing; to comply with CALEA (along with billing-related Sarbanes-Oxley requirements), many turn to third parties, such as Coastal Technologies Group Inc. (www.ctgi.biz/Coastal), which processes "about 10 billion messages per month," according to Richard Kane, president and CEO of Coastal, "of which a billion are VoIP." Coastal has, for example, been able to search calls made using pre-pair calling cards, allow a telecom company to identify a GSM call as it was being set up and get the call details even though the content was scrambled.
To Surcharges ("Taxes"), With or Without Love
Where there's telephone calls, there's charges-and surcharges and taxes. If you doubt that, look at your wireline and/or cell phone bill.
When is a VoIP call a, or part of a, taxable and/or surchargeable call? For that matter, when do access charges become applicable?
In order to comply with the need to pay these charges, a minimum of two things are needed: One, accurate information about calls placed: where do they start, where do they terminate, and so on; and Two, the ability to terminate calls to the PSTN.
Companies like Intrado can provide the former; for the latter, VoIPco's not in a position to make all their own termination deals may work with someone like CommPartners (www.commpartners.us), who is building a new wholesale CLEC network with interconnect agreements to RBOCs and ILECs.
"What's hurting right now is the lack of direction on access charges, the cost for terminating calls," says Kris Twomey, regulatory counsel for CommPartners. "Different carriers take different positions. The regulatory system today says they're not entitled to anything, if my call originates on a computer, it starts as VoIP. but when it lands on a telephone, 'what is it, is it email, IM, or a phone call for which access charges apply?'"
"We need the FCC to make a ruling," says Twomey. "If I called from a regular phone to another, even if it uses IP bypass, the FCC considers that a regular phone call and access charges apply." The real question, according to Twomey: "If a call starts like a VoIP call but lands on a regular phone, do access charges apply? Most access providers say since calls are going down local trunk groups, reciprocal compensation applies."
CommPartners' opinion, says Twomey, is that "all this should be 'bill-andkeep'. carriers don't charge each other, it's an anachronism. There should be no exchange of money. We'll terminate calls for other carriers at no charge and they shouldn't charge us either."
Part of the challenge is that the termination rates vary, especially in urban versus rural areas-and, Twomey points out, "A lot of the rural incumbents get a lot of their revenue from access charges."
A related concern, according to Twomey: "The Telecom Act of 1996 says that all subsidies should be explicit, but the access charge system prevents that from being the case." One alternative would be doing this through the Universal Service Charge (USC), which, he says, at its current 12 per cent rate, "is getting out of hand, but at least it's explicit. The access system on top of USC is an old way of going about things that needs to be discarded."
Adding such things as the FCC Line Charge and Federal Excise Tax and other state and local taxes to VoIP bills may deal a death blow to new VoIPcos, according to Bruce Kushnick, Executive Director of the New Networks Institute (www.newnetworks.com), who has been investigating telco phone charges and related issues for over a decade.
Is Compliance With Data Regulations The Next Battle?
Some of 'VoIP and Regulatory Compliance' has nothing to do with "is it telephony?" so much as the simple growing reality of VoIP, notes Johna Till Johnson, president and senior founding Partner, Nemertes Research (http://nemertes.com), whose organization recently published a volume on this subject. "We're used to thinking in terms of files, databases, et cetera. Now we've got voice mail, and voice communications, that will increasingly fall in the purview of these regulations."
Compliance-related regulations fall into two categories: privacy, and accuracy accountability, according to Johnson, which in turn can be grouped geographically, e.g. California-"There's no organization that doesn't have customers or employees or some other relationship to California, and California is one seventh of the country's economy". To illustrate one example, Johnson asks the following: Which regulations apply to stored voice mail? Do companies need to start archiving voice mail like they do email? What happens if stored voice mail is hacked, revealing private information?
"The legacy response for TDM calls would have been, 'We routinely wipe voice mail' and it was less likely that people would have copies of messages," Johnson notes. "But now, there's no excuse for not being able to record and save voice messages." None of these factors are major roadblocks at this point, Johnson says, and "most of the people we talk to haven't worried about them yet."
But it's clear that VoIP vendors and users are not only going to have to worry about complying with telephone calltype regulations, but also with data-type ones as well-as if they didn't already have enough compliance concerns to worry about already. Daniel P. Dern is our Contributing Editor.