The FCC-imposed deadline for filing Enhanced 911 compliance reports by voice-over-IP service providers came and went yesterday with little fanfare. The fanfare will come when the FCC tallies the reports and makes its decisions on enforcement of the potentially show-stopping penalties with which it has threatened the emerging industry.

The FCC has said it would stop VoIP providers from registering new users in areas where it does not comply with e-911 requirements. It also has threatened fines up to several thousand dollars per day for non-compliance. However, the FCC did relax demands that the companies give up customers who have already contracted for service.

Although few experts in either government or in the service provider market expected the deadline to be met in all markets in terms of compliance, they did expect companies to report on time.

One new company, SunRocket, started by ex-Worldcom executives, claims to have 96% of its 50,000 subscribers serviced by E-911. However, most companies, such as AT&T have not released their compliance numbers.

Vonage, the largest pure VoIP provider claims to be 90% compliant and has filed for a waiver to give it time to meet requirements for the other 10%.

One of the biggest challenges for VoIP providers is in providing full E-911 service to nomadic users--those who take their VoIP client with them on the road.

Stephen Meer, co-founder and CTO at Intrado, said that yesterday marked an important milestone in the evolution of the world of 911 in the U.S. However, he said it was important for the industry to establish benchmarks for what constitutes compliance.

“The massive amount of work in the industry over the last few months has been tremendous,” he said.

Although there isn’t 100% coverage across the industry, Meer said, “We have accomplished in a very short period of months more than possibly could have been imagined if we used the barometer of what happened with wireless or wireline 911.”

Still, the issue remains how to determine compliance. Meer suggests that the FCC cannot simply use connectivity by VoIP providers to a selective router—which acts as a gateway to the PSTN E-911 network—as the sole criteria.

“I would suggest there is a triad of issues that come to bear. It’s not only having voice traffic go to the selective router, but also having good solid data and having that data accessible in real time by the public safety answering points,” Meer said. “That should be the benchmark we use to report.”

Based on the traffic Intrado sees from its customers in delivering E-911 data, Meer said that 80% of address information is erroneous in some fashion and that half of those errors are serious enough to keep the public safety personal from rendering an effective response if they cold not speak to the caller.