Ok this is the first that I have ever heard of this but it is a true story. If you have phone service through your broadband service you might NOT be able to use the 911 Service with it. I would call Vonage to see if it comes with the service you are getting cause most likely in case of an emergency you will not be able to call 911.

Story:

I live north of Dallas and a family in the Richardson area was using a service over their broadband to make calls, they had a fire in their house and when it came down to the wire they tried to call and no luck. The house was burnt down and could not call 911 due to their phone service over broad band.

I also know if you have an alarm system in your house the alarm company will not monitor your house due to the fact it is not tied to your local line which is needed to call you. Just a little FYI as well.


Moral of story:

If you are using Broadband for your phone service make sure you have access to 911 service. I put this in Running a Web Hosting Business due to the fact I know a lot of people who use Vonage and are in the Web hosting industry.

Regards

Frank

http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911

911 dialing is available but not activated automatically. When I was looking into using them, I found this information pretty easily to be honest. However, I feel for the people affected by not having the service.

My only issue with tying my phone to my broadband at home is when the power is out. Unless you have a decent backup power system you can be totally screwed there.

Vonage makes you activate it! Terrible!

That is mostly because the service is by nature portable and, if I recall correctly, they really do STRONGLY urge you to set it up when you go to order. Also, that page has very strenuous language and text that repeatedly tries to ensure that you do sign up for it. Basically, they just need a verification of your "base" physical location.

I still think the 911 setup should be automatic. No way in the world you going to get every customer to set it up manually.

When you sign up for Vonage, it goes through some things about it. The reason that they explain is if you are using your vonage account and a laptop. Example, a salesman. If he was traveling, with the phone, and got hurt and someone called 911 with the phone, the emergency people would go to his house, not his hotel room.

They are very specific to tell you that if you are traveling to keep updating it. I set mine once when I signed up and it's good to go. I understand your logic, but I think they want the emergency location to always match the phone location and this was the best idea.

In order to set up 911 dialing, they need absolute verification of physical access (I think they do this by mailing a postcard with a serial number), to prevent someone from setting a vonage account with their arch enemy's address, and calling 911.

Understandable that they wouldn't want to require everyone to verify their address before they can get started. People just need to be sure they actually set up the 911.

Also, as previously mentioned, it's a good idea to have a UPS for the phone and any networking equipment upstream of the phone. Otherwise you'd be SOL if the power went out.

I bought a large UPS after the first hurricane took our power out. I thought I was ahead of the game for hurricane #2, but sadly, I had the ability to keep the modem and phone on, but Brighthouse (Time Warner / Roadrunner here in Central Florida) had no power to feed me my internet.

We have intermittent power outages here too frequently but usually less than an hour or two. I've seen people post that a 325VA UPS can keep a cable modem/router/vonage up for a couple of hours.