Level 3 Communications Inc. said at this week’s CES expo in Las Vegas it now can provide E911-enabled VoIP services to markets encompassing approximately 60 million U.S. households.
For the past year, Level 3 has been implementing its E911 VoIP in more than 300 markets; the company plans to expand its E911 coverage throughout 2005. The E911 feature lets ISPs, cable companies, local phone companies, long-distance providers and others build E911 functionality into the VoIP services they already offer.
"Adoption of VoIP in both business and residential markets is growing at exponential rates," says Sureel Choksi, executive vice president of services for Level 3. "It is increasingly important that VoIP service providers be able to deliver E911 in order to meet the demands of the market, as well as fulfill important public safety needs.”
E911 provides address-specific information to public safety agencies whenever someone makes a 911 call, enabling first responders to be dispatched to the scene of an emergency, even if the caller cannot speak or if the call disconnects. But delivering E911 presents challenges with VoIP, because pinpointing the location of the caller is difficult in an IP environment. Many technologies only give emergency responders a phone number, not the location of the person requiring assistance.
"In our view, mainstream consumers will not fully embrace voice over IP as a replacement for the traditional landline unless they are confident that it will deliver the public safety features they are accustomed to," says Donna Lachance, senior vice president of consumer voice services for Level 3. "We believe the E911 capability we are embedding into the Level 3 network represents enormous progress in addressing this issue, and that it will serve as a real differentiator for Level 3 in the marketplace.”
