I’m sure you’ve all heard by now about Verizon’s lawsuit to shut down Vonage. Well, now ATT is shutting down some of its own VoIP service due to alleged problems relating to 911 services.

John has stated in his PC Magazine column that the whole 911 “problem” is really just BS to stop VoIP:

Much of the concern always centers around the 911 red herring. When I was a kid, there was no 911 service. We called the cops directly. For other kinds of emergencies, we’d dial zero (even easier than 911) and tell the operator to get an ambulance or whatever was required. Somewhere along the way, the operators started earning too much money and had to be downsized. Now they’re in Bangalore. I’d love to look into the history of 911 services, because I suspect they were implemented to save money, not as a real public service.

Have you ever used 911? They foul up all the time. The system is not effective for many emergencies. I would much rather call a smart local operator, but they are all gone. Now 911 is a convenient foil to ward off VoIP. Also, you will note that there wasn’t much of a complaint during the mobile phone revolution about 911 until VoIP began to emerge as a threat to the phone companies. They had to shore up their defenses by making sure that cell phones had some sort of 911 capability, although they had been operating cellular services without it for years and years. Agh.

Of course John also says in his MarketWatch column that the death of VoIP doesn’t really matter anyway, as anyone with a brain has switched over to free services such as Gtalk:

Early adopters of Vonage were people like me who understood how it worked and why it was cool. But it was still on a public network and subject to the whims of Internet traffic.

You may as well minimize all that with a highly optimized system such as Skype and do computer-to-computer calls especially when they sound as great as they do with Skype.

Recently I was in Amsterdam and chatted with my wife back home over the Skype-like Gtalk, the voice-over-the-Internet system from Google. That was better than any overseas phone connection. I was talking through my laptop’s built-in microphone and listening on the speakers in the machine. It was flawless.

Smart-money types (a.k.a. the techies) have all flocked to these free and better technologies despite any drawbacks, such as poor connectivity within the plain old telephone system’s network infrastructure.