Vonage customers who dialed 911 got only a fast busy signal. Holder said Vonage has solved the predicament by partnering with Intrado, a company most major telephone carriers already use to match a call to its location. Vonage is the first Net telephony service provider Intrado has signed up, but Holder expects his competitors to also sign deals. Vonage's 20,000 customers will now be asked to provide their address, city, state and ZIP code, which will be kept inside Intrado's databases. When a 911 call is dialed, Vonage will bounce the call to Intrado, which will attach the street address. Vonage finishes routing the call. Worldwide, there were about 2.93 million cable telephony subscribers in 2001, more than the 2.5 million most analysts were predicting, according to a study last year by Allied Business Intelligence, an Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based research firm. That number was expected to almost double by the end of 2002, reaching 5.2 million subscribers, the study predicted.