I'd imagine Doc has a cellphone if s*it hits the fan. If not, he surely has a visa card that he could give you. And yes, we warm line customers who don't pay for a day or so first, they can call repair and 911 and that's it. Then that goes dark too. On 03/09/2017 02:23 PM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:

I'm not sure why you'd treat them any differently from any other customer? Your service agreement should include clear info on when accounts will be disconnected, and presumably the customer signed it. Doctor's offices are not considered emergency medical facilities, and in fact, 100% of our doctor/medical offices include "if this is an emergency dial 911" at the beginning of their greetings.

Our ToS also includes: This service may not be used in any life support, emergency response, or other critical communications which may cause loss of life, injury, or property damage. Customer acknowledges that the service may be interrupted on nights and weekends for routine maintenance.

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:16 PM, jungle Boogie <jungleboogie0 at gmail.com <mailto:jungleboogie0 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi All,

What's the general rule/experience when dealing with Doctor offices that have unpaid invoices on postpaid telephone service plans?

This may vary largely in different regions/states, but can a VoIP provider threaten to disconnect telephone service for unpaid invoices? If a Doctor office is on a pre-paid plan, like most VoIP operations, are is there any liabilities on the VoIP provider when the balance falls below a 0 or negative balance and there happens to be a medical emergency? Perhaps it would be possible to disable calling to everyone except 911. Is this a legitimate practice?

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Ah, gotcha, I was thinking inbound calling. But yeah, as someone else said, cell phones are around. We've seen so few 911 calls on our network that I assume people always just call it from their cell phones anyway. Except for one manufacturing customer who seems to have a 911 call at least monthly... Either way, our attorney advised that the non-payment disconnect is perfectly valid if spelled out in writing and the customer is warned of the impending disconnect. We have automatic notifications in our invoicing system. On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 1:54 PM, jungle Boogie <jungleboogie0 at gmail.com> wrote:

On 9 March 2017 at 11:23, Carlos Alvarez <caalvarez at gmail.com> wrote:

...

Doctor's offices are not considered emergency medical facilities, and in fact, 100% of our doctor/medical offices include "if this is an emergency dial 911" at the beginning of their greetings.

Well this is more of the case if the Doctor is seeing someone in their office, and there some type of a medical emergency.

Your TOS seems to cover that for in/outbound calling regardless.

-- ------- inum: 883510009027723 sip: jungleboogie at sip2sip.info

I guess the reverse of the question would be...why? We've never been approached by a real prospect who wanted to use it in such cases, nor has anyone ever complained about this wording. We took that language idea from the many similar software license agreements, like the ones saying you can't use it in a nuclear plant or air traffic control for example. Our lawyer said that fighting an indemnification battle is much harder than "they violated our contract therefore we're not liable." That choice was backed up when we were threatened with a lawsuit by a plumbing company that takes emergency calls 24x7. We had a planned outage on a Sunday and they said they lost an emergency damage call, so we should be partly responsible for the damage that they couldn't respond to promptly. We fired them, by the way. They were assholes anyway. Any time a new prospect comes to you saying he's looking for a great VoIP carrier because the last four have sucked, don't let your ego tell you that you're better. Realize that the common problem with all of them is that customer. On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 5:24 PM, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com> wrote:

Carlos,

On Thu, Mar 09, 2017 at 12:23:13PM -0700, Carlos Alvarez wrote:

...

Our ToS also includes: This service may not be used in any life support, emergency response, or other critical communications which may cause loss of life, injury, or property damage.

I am curious why you take this approach as opposed to allowing such use, provided that you are indemnified from any civil liability arising as a result of exclusive dependence on your service in such uses.

-- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC

Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/