[Canada]

Your suggestion just isn't realistic when you look at how VoIP systems work in practice. What you usually have are SIP clients talking to SIP servers which then involve a bunch more servers and proxies and a slew of other protocols. SIP traffic from the endpoint and the associated RTP stream could be tunneled, often for very good reason. You can't prevent that with any kind of IP registration scheme because then the client can't roam which defeats the best reason to deploy VoIP in the first place. Providers are routing calls dynamically for reliability and cost reasons. Sometimes when you ask a server to terminate a call it just redirects it elsewhere. Even endpoints can arbitrarily redirect calls.

Ultimately none of the providers involved can know where either end of the call is. We can't even know their IP address for certain, let alone their physical location. What we have for 911 is a form where the customer declares their physical address and a disclaimer warning the customer that should they move then emergency calls will not be routed to the most appropriate call center and the operator will get the wrong address.

There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it. Any attempt to do so would result in honest users being unable to call for help in emergencies causing far more harm than the abuse we're trying to prevent.

[johansch]

You are not going to convince me, or anyone else who understand the tech, that this is a fundamentally unsolvable technical problem, I promise. It all boils down to compromises between regulation vs freedom, etc.

So, I do take issue when you say things like:

> There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it.