TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Vonage Outage Last Thursday, was: Vonage

Re: Vonage Outage Last Thursday, was: Vonage

Thor Lancelot Simon (tls@panix.com)
Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:42:10 UTC

In article <telecom24.99.4@telecom-digest.org>, Danny Burstein
<dannyb@panix.com> wrote:

> FYI, quoting from an AP dispatch:

> "Vonage ... suffered an outage that left about half of its 500,000
> subscribers without phone service for about 45 minutes.

> "The outage was caused by a glitch with a software upgrade Thursday
> night, said Brooke Schulz, a spokeswoman for Vonage Holdings Corp.

> "The problem struck at about 2:45 p.m. EST, and Vonage stabilized the
> network with a software patch within an hour...

Unfortunately, the actualy duration of the problem was several hours;
Vonage is, quite simply, lying. And the problem recurred on two
successive days.

If Vonage were a regulated entity -- which it's gone to great lengths
to not be -- there would be significant penalties not just for this
sort of service failure (note that Vonage hasn't exactly contacted its
customers and offered to refund any of their money for the time that
their phones were out of service) -- but also for lying about it.

If Vonage isn't going to be a regulated entity, fine. But in that
case it is just totally inappropriate for them to turn around and use
a complaisant FCC board as a stick to beat _other_ unregulated
entities with when they happen to do things that Vonage finds
inconvenient.

We can argue about whether or not telecom regulation is a good thing.
But "just however much regulation Vonage likes, whenever Vonage
happens to like it", I think, is unquestionably a bad thing.

Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com

"The inconsistency is startling, though admittedly, if consistency is
to be abandoned or transcended, there is no problem." - Noam Chomsky

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