[Novalug] [OT] Verizon Experience Store Grand Opening

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 12:51:43PM -0500, Russell Evans wrote:
>It used to be that 911 calls, on any phone line with dial tone,
>subscribed or not, where required to work. Has that changed? . 

No. The question is whether the phone line works, not whether 911 works.

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 01:00:44PM -0500, Ken Kauffman wrote:
>Skyrocket and some others use your internet service as the backbone.  Do
>you trust your internet provider to be available in a 911 situation?
>For instance, you hear someone breaking into your home.

Yes. But beyond that, I'd probably use my cell phone. You're not going 
to get perfect reliability no matter what (I've seen dead phones--it 
does happen). So the question is how much are you willing to pay for how 
much chance of a working phone. $1/mo for 50%? $10000/mo for 99.99999%? 
It's a sliding scale that gets a lot more expensive as the number of 9's 
increases.  Different people make different tradeoffs, which is 
fine--but it's facile to treat this as a binary "have POTS and have 911" 
or "have something else and don't" choice. In either case you'd better 
have a fallback plan, because things will always go wrong; even if you 
have POTS it would be good to have a cell, a neighbor, first aid 
training, etc. IMO, people are generally paying for a level of 
reliability that they by-and-large do not need. A cellphone is probably 
less reliable than a POTS today, but the cellphone is probably more 
reliable in an area that has coverage than a POTS was 50 years ago, and 
you're a lot more likely to have the cellphone in an emergency than you 
are to have a POTS. So there are some potential risks to dropping the 
POTS, but there are also potential advantages--and dropping the POTS 
makes it easier to pay for the cell phone which will help you a lot more 
if your 911 need occurs in the car.

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 01:10:16PM -0500, Kevin Kitts wrote:
>I remember once only a few years ago when the remnant of the hurricane hit
>that my phone continued to work perfectly even though I was without power
>for about 5 days. Now that is cool - don't you think. I think the world is
>on a Walmart/Dollar Store trend where cheaper and/or faster is the thing
>that matters most. 

Saying things are only cheaper and faster than they used to be (implying 
that they're otherwise worse) is nostalgia and selected memory of how 
things were. People also want more flexibility, more choices, more 
capabilities, etc. Yeah, I want to pay less--but I also want to keep my 
phone number if I move. Again, there's good and there's bad, and almost 
nothing is one or the other.

Mike Stone