I’m up later than I probably should be tonight, but as I’m trying to wind down to go to sleep, some thoughts have been running through my mind. On the heels of this article, I am once again reminded about the issue of Net Neutrality. While I am completely for the concept of Net Neutrality in the sense that I think it should be illegal for the pipeline provider to reclassify your packets, there is one single edge case that comes to my mind that is not like the others. This issue is about emergency services calls over VoIP (or whatever the defacto technology is at any point in time in the future). In this one case the providers should be allowed, in fact even required, to grant higher priority to calls, as it could very well be a matter of life and death.
That brings me to another issue. The FCC is starting to take preliminary comments about an eventual switchover from the current TDM phone network that we all know to a packet voice network (in this case, specifically VoIP). Now there is at least one major kink in handling routing of emergency services calls. If I were managing a service provider (i.e. an ITSP), I would not want to rely on the consumer to keep all records up to date, and what of the case where somebody is running their own PBX and has multiple users from multiple geographic locations? As we are all waiting to see if the USA in general will join the 1990’s by finally starting to roll out IPv6 natively on the wire on a grand scale, there *might* be a solution to that built into IPv6. Another member of the FreeSWITCH community suggested that the IPv6 mobility extensions might hold the key to this problem. His understanding is that information about the geographical location of the system using the IP address gets (or can get) encoded into the packets with the mobility extensions. I myself have not yet read up on IPv6 mobility extensions, so if any of you have and have some input on this, I’d love to hear about it.