Vonage’s inability to meet the Federal Communications Commission’s E911 deadline is a direct result of foot-dragging by major incumbent telcos, the company said today. Two incumbents, BellSouth and AT&T, formerly SBC Communications, said that's not true.

In its waiver request, filed with the FCC on Monday night, Vonage seeks an extension of the Nov. 28 deadline for having E911 services available to its customers and asks the commission to appoint an administrator to assign pseudo-Automatic Number Identifications (P-ANIs) to VoIP providers, in order to speed the process of providing nomadic E911.

“We are 90% compliant with the part of the process that we control,” said Brooke Schulz, vice president of corporate communications and regulatory affairs for Vonage. “We can get our customers’ calls to the selective routers. But once they are there, we are dependent on the ILECs to provision functional elements like the P-ANI and the shell record, but most of them have not finished the provisioning of these elements, and some of them haven’t started.”

Verizon is the only Bell company to have provisioned these functional elements within its network, Schulz said. SBC, Qwest and others haven’t finished the provisioning process, she maintained, and BellSouth hasn’t started.

BellSouth and SBC are both disputing the Vonage claims.

In a letter sent to the FCC Monday night, BellSouth said it "has been working cooperatively with Vonage on E911 issues since March, 2005," has assigned a vice president as a single point of contact on E911 issues and issued a tariff in August for access to selective routers. In addition, BellSouth specifically developed a a new P-ANI service, designed to Vonage's specifications, and offered it to the VoIP provider in late July as a professional services agreement. Any delays are Vonage's doing, the company said.

"Although the service was developed exclusively for Vonage at its sole request, Vonage did not respond to BellSouth's proposed agreement or express to BellSouth any intention to take the service until Nov. 14, 2005," the letter states.

According to AT&T/SBC, it issued assignment guidelines for p-ANI and shell records to Vonage on September 30 and stated in those guideslines that it would complete valid assignment requests within five to seven days.

"To date, we received requests from Vonage for Michigan and Kansas on October 12," a spokesman said in an email post. "Both requests were completed, Kansas was completed in five days. The Michigan request had multiple discrepancies which we worked with Vonage and the PSAPs to correct. Once the corrections were made, that document was returned to Vonage in 5 days. To date those are the only requests we have received from Vonage."

Vonage is claiming the telcos are deliberately creating problems. In Verizon’s franchise area, “nearly all” will be E911 compliant on time, the company said, “due in large part to Verizon’s cooperation and leadership.”

As of today, Vonage can transmit ANI and Registered Location information for 100% of its customers and has 90% of those customers connected to selective routers, which can then connect to a Public Safety Access Point or other designated answering authority, the company states in its FCC waiver filing. Only about 26% of Vonage’s customers lines can actually be deliver to E911-capable PSAPs, however, because of problems with the ILEC end of the connection, Schulz said.

Many of the other VoIP providers achieved compliance by eliminating the ability of customers to choose their area code, she maintained.

“We are one of the only ones still assigning non-local numbers, and we will keep doing it because our customers want it,” Schulz said.

Non-local numbers allow customers to make long-distance calls look like local calls based on how area codes are assigned. Those non-local numbers are a key problem in E911, however, because they can result in routing of emergency calls to a distant location, based on the area code.

Vonage is hoping the FCC bends to Congressional pressure and extends the deadline again, taking into account the resources Vonage has deployed to date and the real cause of the problem, Schulz said. Restricting the company’s ability to market its services where E911 is not available – which is the prescribed FCC reaction – would play into the hands of the companies not providing the resources Vonage needs to meet the FCC requirements.

“The FCC’s order didn’t put any pressure on the Bells,” she said. “Why would they help us, if not doing E911 prevents another competitor from coming in?”