I was shocked when I turned on my computer last month only to find an e-mail telling me that my telephone service had been turned off. The notice was from the VoiceWing unit of Verizon -- the part of the company that provides Internet phone service, known as Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP -- and it had been sitting in my mail-stream for hours before I saw it.

According to the message, because it couldn't verify that my phone was within its 911 coverage, it had temporarily suspended my service due to a new 911 policy. It turned off all inbound and outbound calls, including 911.

Once I realized the service was cut, which was hours after it had been turned off, it only took a few minutes on the Net to turn it back on. In the meantime, several callers couldn't reach me through my VoiceWing number. Luckily, I had another non-VoiceWing line for the callers to reach me.

My first thought when I realized what happened was, "What a foolish decision!" If the company is trying to protect people by making sure they have proper 911 access, why would they disallow outbound calls. It's totally backward.

After several phone calls to various executives at Verizon, including the head of the VoiceWing unit, I finally came to the realization that it was a very sloppy, sometimes customer-unfriendly, implementation of a pretty good idea. I was one of those who got stuck on the customer-unfriendly side.

VoiceWing, by the way, has made other sloppy moves, such as using portions of customer credit card numbers as ID verification for support calls and using credit card data as default access codes for customers who don't pick a personal ID for their voice mail.

VoiceWing, and the other VoIP service providers including Vonage, AT&T CallVantage and Lingo, have recently been required by the FCC to provide real 911 service -- in which you pick up your VoIP phone, dial 911 and go straight into the 911 switchboard in your area -- as a prerequisite for connecting calls to the traditional public phone system. In the past, many VoIP 911 calls would have gone instead to an administrative line in your local public safety service.

One of the challenges faced by VoIP service providers is the nomadic nature of the service. Customers using VoIP connect their phones into a device called an ATA, which simply connects them into their local broadband Internet line. These ATAs are coded to be recognized by the VoIP service, but the user can move them, and thereby their telephones, to any location that has a broadband connection. When they do, they render the phone service's records inaccurate, meaning they don't know where to send your 911 call.

Verizon decided to go a step further than simply carrying out the FCC order. It decided to implement a nomadic 911 procedure, which would flag your account when your ATA is disconnected and make you tell them your new address so the company can properly direct your 911 call based on your new location.

Unfortunately, the way Verizon implemented it for VoiceWing, if your broadband line goes down momentarily or even if you inadvertently disconnect the ATA power or connection to your line, VoiceWing will consider you a nomad and disconnect your service until you tell them your "new" location.

That's apparently what happened to me. According to Verizon executives, my ATA was disconnected from 6:45 to 8:35 that morning. So I was put into Nomad mode, ie., no service, until I checked my e-mail hours later.

Good idea, Verizon. Bad way to do it. There's got to be a better way, which I'll discuss in my next column.