EarthLink, Vonage Opt for Level 3 E911 Services

Both EarthLink Inc. and America Online Inc. have selected Level 3 Communications Inc. to provide services to support their E911 services.

Vonage Network, a subsidiary of Vonage Holdings Corp., has selected Level 3 to enable critical components of its nomadic E911 service. Level 3 will deliver its Level(3) E-911 Direct service to support Vonage’s E911 rollout.
According to the Level 3 announcement, EarthLink plans to introduce several new voice services, including a “line-powered” residential phone service that can operate during a power outage.

It will be marketed as a primary-line alternative to the PSTN. In addition, EarthLink will roll out a new residential VoIP service, EarthLink trueVoice, that will include a number of new features, such as call blocking.

Both AOL and EarthLink will use an expanded E911 service from Level 3, called E-911 Direct. The company has been providing a 911 service but this new service expands on that offering with support for nomadic VoIP users. E-911 Direct includes both Level 3’s fixed location and nomadic VoIP E-911 capabilities, and helps provide an FCC-compliant E911 system for interconnected VoIP providers. The service now covers 67 percent of U.S. households, and the company plans to cover 70 percent by the end of the year.

To offer the nomadic portion of the E-911 Direct service, Level 3 is working with multiple VoIP positioning centers (VPCs) that are responsible for collecting, updating and reporting subscriber location information. The information provided by the VoIP positioning centers will allow public safety answering point (PSAP) operators to provide critical location information to emergency responders.

One of those positioning centers, TeleCommunication Systems Inc. (TCS), just made an agreement with Level 3 to deliver E911 emergency service components to the customers of Level 3's service.

The E-911 Direct service routes and completes 911 calls with physical location information to the appropriate selective router and PSAP. It works with Level 3's (3)VoIP Enhanced Local and (3)VoIP Local Inbound services to provide local and nationwide IP voice services. According to Level 3 service providers can use the service to achieve compliance with the FCC’s requirement for VoIP providers to deliver E911 to their customers.

EarthLink also has chosen Level 3's (3)VoIP service to provide termination to the PSTN. In addition, Level 3 will provide telephone numbers that EarthLink can assign to its voice customers and will assist in making local numbers portable for EarthLink customers.

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