AT&T CallVantage Heartbeat Sounds Like a Pain

Theres been a bit written in a few places on the web about the new AT&T CallVantage feature dubbed Heartbeat. The most noteworthy is probably Andy Abramsons assessment here. The purpose of this feature is to ensure accurate delivery of E-911 information to emergency call centers. Andy takes an overall positive view, but I have to say that I come down on the other side of the fence.

The gist of Heartbeat is that each time your VoIP adapter is powered down, you are required to confirm with AT&T whether or not the access device has moved and, if it has, the new location of the box. This sounds like a tremendous, tremendous pain to me. I hope for the sake of any AT&T CallVantage customers who are road warriors that this is an optional feature of the service. Im not able to find anything about the feature in the att.com domain using Google, and a quick scan of the AT&T news releases doesnt tell me anything.

I really do hope this feature is optional, because I can think of about a million scenarios in which a user isnt going to want to take the time to re-register their location each time they take their adapter on the road. Its not too hard to imagine a large number of scenarios in which this feature (this word is being generous) could cause problems in an actual emergency.

The Barton-Dingell telecom bill includes requirements for provisions of location information for VoIP callers making 911 calls. In my reading of the bill this leads me to take away a coming development of GPS functionality into VoIP adapters. This will at least save the trouble of re-registering your exact location every time you plug in your VoIP adapter. This is provided, of course, that emergency call centers have the ability to capture GPS data, and I suspect that functionality is not there yet. Yeah, I need to do some more research.