Vonage, the nation's largest non-cable provider of internet phone service, could be barred from signing up new customers in many markets because it failed to meet the deadline to provide reliable emergency 911 service to all subscribers.
The FCC gave Vonage and other internet phone companies 120 days to comply with its order requiring enhanced 911, or E911, in all their service areas. The deadline to show the government where E911 is available was Monday.
Vonage said only 26 percent of its customer base had full E911 services. The company -- which has more than 1 million subscribers -- said it was capable of transmitting a call back number and location for 100 percent of its subscribers, but that it still was waiting for cooperation from competitors that control the 911 network.
The FCC in May ordered companies selling VOIP to ensure that callers can reach an emergency dispatcher when they dial 911. The dispatchers also must be able to tell where callers are located and the numbers from which they are calling.
VOIP providers were told that if they failed to meet the deadline they could no longer market their service or accept new customers in areas that didn't have enhanced 911. They will not have to disconnect current customers who don't have full 911 service, as some providers had feared.
"If you can't add customers in, say, a third of your territories, that's a significant part of the market where you are all of a sudden capped," said David Kaut, a telecom analyst at Legg Mason. "These are supposed to be growth companies."
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Mobile for the masses: Texas Instruments says it is testing two new semiconductor chipsets that could mark the next step in making so-called third-generation mobile phones more affordable and widely available.
Texas Instruments (TXN) has tested a new and advanced chipset with Japan's NTT DoCoMo and expects phones with the new component to be on the Japanese market next year.
The new chipset, which combines a modem with an applications processor, was designed to improve the video performance of advanced phones.
The company, which has been helped by a close alliance with Nokia, claims that its chips are in more than half the wireless phones sold in the world.
Texas Instruments officials say their revenue from next-generation phone components this year is already more than $600 million. TI expects sales to top $1 billion next year.
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Know your ABCs: Although internet domain names may be getting longer or more complex as websites creatively squeeze into the crowded ".com" address space, most single-letter names like "a.com" and "b.com" remain unused. That may soon change as the internet's key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names.
In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, ICANN will chart a course for single-letter web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver. Those names could start to appear next year.
Matt Bentley, chief executive of domain name broker Sedo.com, said single-letter ".com" names could fetch six-figure sums, and a few might even command more than $1 million from some of the internet's biggest companies. Yahoo (YHOO) applied for a trademark to "y.com" this year.
Single-letter names under ".com," ".net" and ".org" were set aside in 1993 as engineers grew concerned about their ability to meet the expected explosion in demand for domain names.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP contributed to this report.
