Power-Proofing VOIP

Just finished a conversation about the lawsuit against Vonage for their failing to provide 911 service. The consensus was that Vonage will win easily; there are serious warnings to just this effect when you sign up for a Vonage account. What will be interesting is when a babysitter or other non-family member tries to dial 911 and suffers injury or death as a result of it being plugged into the internet instead of the PSTN. They never signed a contract, so Vonage could be held liable.

For my family, the deal-breaker in switching to VOIP was the fact that the line goes down with the power. With a regular phone, you can still make calls during power outages, but if your cable modem goes down and you’ve got Vonage, you’re screwed.

If you plug the cable modem and the VOIP hardware into a UPS, however, would the call go through? Theoretically, cable service isn’t tied to electricity, so the answer would seem to be yes. Has anyone tried this?

March 23, 2005 - 02:50 PM