AT&T Launches ‘Locate Before Route’ Feature for 911 Calls

AT&T announced the industry’s first location-based routing system for emergency calls, making the process of locating callers by first responders faster with the potential to save even more lives.

On other carriers, when you place a 911 call via your cellphone, your call is routed based on the cell tower connected to your device. Towers can cover areas of up to 10 miles, so in terms of precise positioning and location information relay, it’s not always the best case scenario for first responders. With this launch, AT&T can now identify a 911 caller’s position within 50 meters, then route the call to the appropriate emergency operator.

AT&T provided a helpful graphic to break it down for us.

We hope no one here will ever need to use this great new feature, but should you have to, it’s good to know that it exists.

AT&T states that the technology will be rolled out nationwide by the end of June and is currently live in several states. The first market that went live was Snohomish County, Washington. That’s the county just north of Seattle, WA.

// AT&T