Vonage and the good folks at Intrado have announced that they have successfully tested an E-911 solution in Rhode Island, home of PFF Fact Book co-author (and disgruntled Red Sox fan) Mike Pickford. The technical verbiage from the Vonage press release:

When Vonage customers dial 9-1-1, the call is routed over Vonage's 9-1-1 server using industry standard SIP protocol. The Vonage server then queries Intrado for routing instructions. The call is then directed to the selective router that serves the Rhode Island Public Safety Answering Point ("PSAP"). Simultaneously, Intrado places the customer's address and telephone number into the Automatic Location Information (ALI) server. The supplementary special key unique to the call is included in signaling, and allows the PSAP 9-1-1 operator to pull the customer's address and phone number from the ALI database.

Good news to see these companies moving to the market with new solutions, regardless of the regulatory uncertainty and merits of the positions surrounding public safety and VoIP at the moment. For those in Colorado, Silicon Flatirons will be providing a break from the Salazar/Coors Senate race deluge by hosting a conference on USF and 911 issues next week. This may be the last SFTP event before Colorado invades North Dakota, so I'm fairly confident that Professor Weiser's synapses will be firing on all cylinders.