You haven't acknowledged VoIP E911 limitations? Get ready for pester-overdrive

If you are a VoIP subscriber, you better hope your VoIP provider keeps efficient enough records to separate those customers who have acknowledged the limitations of VoIP E911 from those who have not.

Should your VoIP provider not have that data wall in place, get ready for a barrage of emails,voice mails, phone calls, snail mail, and so forth. Right up until the Federal Communications Commission's mandated compliance date.

The original deadline was to be this Friday. Now, as stipulated in a ruling that came down late yesterday, the FCC has given VoIP service providers some extra time to obtain acknowledgement from subscribers that they understand and accept the current limitations of E911 over VoIP.

The extension is not a relaxation, but a strict edict that if anything, is more specific than the dictate associated with the previous deadline.

By Wednesday, August 10, VoIP service providers need to file a detailed report to the FCC of how the provider has informed all of its existing subscribers of these limitations, the percentage of subscribers that have complied by acknowledging these limitations; how records of subscriber acknowledgements are stored, and what actions the provider intends to take with reference to those subscribers who have not provided their acknowledgements by August 29.

So what happens if even just a few of a VoIP providers subscribers do not indicate their acknowledgement of E911's limitations by that date?

I quote directly from the FCC's edict:

"Further, we expect that if an interconnected VoIP provider has not received subscriber acknowledgements from 100% of its existing subscribers by August 29, 2005, then the interconnected VoIP provider will disconnect, no later than August 30, 2005, all subscribers from whom it has not received such acknowledgements."

Although the FCC's new edict does not proscribe penalties for VoIP providers who don't cut off non-respondents by August 30, you can bet that your VoIP provider will pester those non-respondents by any means possible until they send in their acknowledgements.

And that means every single last one of you.

Not because they want to pester you, but because their lawyers will make them.