Emergency 911 service over VOIP for children at home

May 8, 2023 5:30 PM

I am looking for a VOIP service that my 9 year old can use if I'm unexpectedly incapacitated while she's home with me and/or for when I eventually start letting her stay at home on her own while I run down the street. She knows how to use the emergency feature on my iPhone but if she doesn't have access to it, I'd like to have a fallback.

Ideally, this will be cheap. I've heard of some services that are less than $5/month; I saw something a month or two ago that looked just right and I didn't save the link unfortunately. This question from 2015 is very similar to mine but an update with any new offerings would help.

posted by scottso17 to Technology (8 answers total)

Do you have a spare cell phone you are no longer using? Cells phone can call 911 even when they are not hooked up to service through a carrier.
posted by DJWeezy at 5:36 PM on May 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

Any old cell phone not on an active plan will call 911. An old smart phone connected to WiFi will also allow your kid to send you a chat message if they need you in a not-quite-emergency. Importantly, a decommissioned cell phone will still call 911 if the power and internet is out due to a storm.
posted by phunniemee at 5:38 PM on May 8, 2023

Response by poster: I'm looking for a service that will transmit my address automatically to 911 like a landline. I understand cell phones don't all automatically do this.
posted by scottso17 at 6:20 PM on May 8, 2023

Best answer: Ooma is an inexpensive VoIP service that provides e911 as part of the deal. (They advertise service as being free after you purchase the ~$100 adapter or their phones, but you still need to pay ~$5 or so a month for taxes, one of those taxes being the necessary 911 tax.)
posted by eschatfische at 6:33 PM on May 8, 2023

Best answer: Echoing eschatfische: Ooma does what you want. You have to buy the adapter box, and you'll need a phone handset too, then it's almost free. (We've used Ooma for many years happily, it's reliable).

The downside to VOIP of course is that it relies on your internet; if that's gone down then your VOIP won't work.
posted by anadem at 8:12 PM on May 8, 2023

I use voip.ms for this and I think e911 is like $1.50 a month or something like that. Having the number is $0.85 a month. I have an OBI200 that bridges from the voip to my POTS landline in my house and then a normal landline phone.
posted by cmm at 8:20 AM on May 9, 2023

cmm, the Obi200 series devices have an end-of-life date late this year and should not be recommended as a solution here. I used an Obi device with Google Voice in prior years, and call completion with certain carriers became enough of a problem that I took it out of service. It's clear that Obi is no longer part of a viable solution to this sort of thing.
posted by eschatfische at 9:45 AM on May 9, 2023

Thanks for pointing out that EOL. I had no idea. All of this just sits out of the way for me and just works. I knew Poly didn't take care of Obihai after it bought it so it isn't surprising. I imagine that when my OBI200 breaks I will buy a Grandstream HT 802.

For some maybe the $5 a month vs $2.35 a month is meaningful. Porting in a number for voip.ms is free too (vs $40 with Ooma) and initial cost is lower (HT 802 looks like it is $40 vs $99 for Ooma).
posted by cmm at 10:37 AM on May 9, 2023