Vonage sued by the State of Texas over 911
The State of Texas, in a seriously misguided move, is suing VoIP provider Vonage, claiming that Vonage does not make it clear to customers that they do not provide traditional 911 service. This was brought about by a story a couple weeks ago here in the Houston area, where a teenaged daughter tried to call 911 from a Vonage phone during a burglery in which her parents were shot.
Why do I think this lawsuit is misguided? I’m a Vonage customer, and the case is without merit. Let me describe the layout of the booklet that describes the features of your Vonage service, the one that you get with every new VoIP adapter. Page 1 is the inside cover, and is blank. Page 2 is a place to write down your new Vonage phone number, serial number, etc. Page 3 is a general “Welcome to Vonage” type thingy. Page 4, the second “real” page of the manual, talks, in big, BOLD print, HOW TO ACTIVATE 911, and HOW IT’S DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL 911!! Holy Shit! Right there! In BOLD! Where you can’t possibly miss it, unless you don’t bother to RTFM! The booklet, after discussing 911 (taking two pages to do so) then goes on to talk about other features, like voice mail, call forwarding, etc. But there it is, right at the front, 911. In fact, you see the 911 thing BEFORE you see the welcome to Vonage thing when you open the booklet, because our eyes naturally expect books to start on the right hand page, and not the left, so our eyes are drawn there first.
Then there’s the phone and account activation process. This process takes you through all the steps required to activate your phone and create your account. And it tells you that you have to activate the 911 service. So does the confirmation e-mail you get when your account is created. So does the dashboard page that you’re taken to when you sign in for the first time. In numerous ways and instances, Vonage makes it quite clear that 911 service is not activated by default (it can’t be, since the phone number is NOT tied to a location, unlike traditional phone service) and that you have to activate it and indicate where the phone is located so that they can route the call to the proper 911 center, and they explain the difference between their 911 service and traditional E911.
While it’s tragic that these people got shot, the fact that their 911 service wasn’t activated is because of their own stupidity or ignorance, and suing Vonage isn’t the answer, neither for these people nor for the State of Texas. Any judge worth his salt will take one look at the manual and dismiss the case, with prejudice, based on the (lack of) merit.