A Comcast insider warns us that Comcast does no checks to make sure 911 is working on your Comcast digital phone:

UPDATE: Comcast PR says this information is incorrect. Their statement, inside…

…it has come to my attention that Comcast does not run any checks to see if their e911 service is working on your Comcast Digital Voice (CDV) service this means that if your house is on fire and you call 911 with a Comcast phone it might not work. Problems can occur on a account basis so your neighbors service might be fine but you may not be able to connect to your local 911 service or it may route you to the local 911 administrator’s line. The only way you will know if there is a problem is if you call 911. This scared me as well as my co-workers when we were informed.

We don’t know whether this is any different from the behavior of any other digital voice provider, or if 911 failure has ever happened to a customer, but the prospect of not being able to reach 911 certainly is frightening.

Comcast PR rebuts:

The information that was provided for this posting is false. Comcast does check to see if our E911 service is working and tests our 911/E911 capabilities regularly. We take 911/E911 very seriously, as any phone provider should, and we comply with the FCC’s E911 requirements and follow accepted industry procedures and practices on 911/E911.

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