My wife’s parents are over in the US from Europe. They finished their two-week stay with us this morning. We’ve equipped them with a car, a credit card and a cell phone, and pointed them westwards. They’re driving down towards Dodge City today and on to a rendezvous in Vegas in two weeks’ time. (Maybe the credit card wasn’t such a good idea after all…)
Anyway, by the principle of conservation of cell phones, my wife is now cellphoneless. Decellularized. Unmobilated. (In case any of you think that’s lacking in chivalry not relinquishing my own phone, let me tell you I’m now carless. In sprawling suburban Overland Park, that is like being blind and limbless in most of the rest of the world. Serious personal impairment.) So no cell phone means she’s sat at home, baby on lap, with just a Vonage phone and a Yahoo instant messenger client to get hold of me. Both of which have a single point of failure, our Roadrunner cable modem. And her parents are 100% relying on Vonage to get hold of her in an emergency.
Now, I’m damned pleased with Roadrunner. Reliable, fast and good value. But their DNS server can be pretty wobbly at times — they’ve been struggling to return the address of one of their own web sites recently. (I have a home web server that places my current IP address on my ISP’s FTP server once an hour, in case the dynamic DNS service update fails when I’m away. I can then SSH back home to fix any problems. When it fails, I get an email.) The service has been known to go down from time to time, too. We’ve had a few difficulties with Vonage too, but nothing that a quick hard reset couldn’t cure. And before now all it did was delay an intercontinental social call back home.
It’s only when you really rely on VoIP and VoIP alone do you feel that feeling of being a bit exposed. You know, like when you’ve decided to pass another car and get alongside and wish you’d put your foot down a few seconds earlier as the next corner looms. I’m at risk, and either this damned machine works perfectly, or I’m in a lot of doo doo. Not as bad as when I did a bungy jump, but a definite moderate nervous edge.
There’s a nice comment by Steve Saenz on this old article of mine on Vonage. He documents his difficulties in getting it to work reliably. He can’t be alone.
I just wonder if we’re set up for a backlash. Some day, someone will have a serious mishap because a VoIP call failed when a POTS one clearly wouldn’t. They might even die. Even if as a society we’d be safer on average with an IP communications solution, this will make the TV news and the press. And they’ll make a BIG thing of it, because nobody tunes in to hear that there were no sensational events today.
How long will it be before the speeding truck comes round the corner? I don’t know, but it will give the incumbents potent political ammunition when it happens.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 06:07 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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