FCC chairman wants to mandate E911 for VoIP

Vonage has already managed to get themselves sued over not providing automatic access to E911 calling with their broadband VoIP service, but new FCC chairman Kevin Martin thinks he has the solution: simply mandate that all VoIP providers have to connect to the E911 system within four months. Yeah, sounds so easy, right? The devil is really in the details here, if connecting up to the E911 system wasn't all that tough you'd think most VoIP providers would have already done it by now. The proposal itself hasn't been made public yet, so what it's really going to come down to are the mechanics of how the FCC ensures that VoIP providers are granted access to the E911 system. Oh, and how they're going to deal with the the inherent difficulties in automatically identifying a caller's location over VoIP. The commission is set to vote on the proposal on May 19th.