For some time now, the U.S. government has legislated that state emergency service authorities and cellular operators comply with an enhanced911 initiative that would ensure that mobile calls to emergency services would also forward the caller’s number and location. The Federal Communications Commission issued its first E911 directions to cellular operators in July 1996. Seven years later, all the member states of the European Union should, in theory, have a comparable set of laws ratified at the member-state level.
The European Commission, member states and cellular operators have long recognized the value of an E911 equivalent initiative. With that in mind, the EC established the research initiatives LOCUS and CGALIES to carry out an extensive review of 112 emergency service provision, attempting to formulate a workable and realistic set of E112 requirements for EU member states to abide by.
From a technical perspective, recommendations suggest that member states must successfully regulate an environment within which network operators should be able to:
c Forward the best available location information to PSAPs for all E112 calls;
c Provide originating network identification data;
c Not discriminate on the quality of location data supplied;
c Keep up-to-date location databases of their own subscribers;
c “Pull” caller location data via call-back functions or from databases of terminated call data;
c Adopt common interfaces and data transfer standards.
EC member-state surveys from 2000 and 2001 indicate that the level of service availability and functionality for emergency phone calls made from fixed-line addresses varied extensively from state to state. In some instances operators automatically provide the data to public safety answering points and in others, PSAPs had to make manual “call backs” to cross reference the callers’ numbers with the operators’ customer databases. In some states even Caller Line Identification was not available.
Meanwhile, the dramatic proliferation of mobile phone ownership in Europe means that more and more emergency calls are being made from mobile numbers. With an average 75-percent penetration of the EU population, the mobile phone has become the most readily accessible means of calling for help, with 40 million “mobile” emergency calls being made within the EU in 2001 alone. However, an estimated 6 million of those calls were reported as problematically/unsuccessfully dealt with, specifically due to the insufficient availability of information about the caller’s whereabouts.
At present in Europe, the most likely means to be used to position mobile phones is by way of “traffic data” techniques, i.e. methods that utilize protocols and procedures already existent within a GSM network, examples of which include, Cell ID, Timing Advance and Radio Signal Strength. It is important to get tried and tested, reliable mobile location systems functioning on an EU-wide level, before the more specific issue of high accuracy positioning resolution need be addressed.
While EC-funded action groups such as CGALIES have researched the likely level of location accuracy needed to provide an ideal service, it is clear that the extensive logistical exercise of getting E112 up and running is far more important from a coordinated regulatory perspective than mandating specific technical performance requirements. Cellular operators have argued that it would be prudent to allow commercial location services to provide the impetus to buy supplementary high-accuracy positioning equipment, which will then in turn benefit E112. Essentially it is a case of the EC carefully making sure that the E112 service sector can walk before expecting it to run.
Fortuitously for the EC and for E112, the commercial opportunities for location-based services have already helped benefit the eventual realization of enhanced emergency services. Recent research carried out by Concise Insight, in its report European Location-Based Services 2003: Operator Status & Market Drivers found that by early 2003, the majority of Western European cellular operators were offering commercial location-based services. This resulted in 133 individual commercial services being available, 5 percent of which had already been put in place to provide emergency services, regardless of 112 requirements.
This experience for cellular operators in dealing with and processing location data is vitally important to understanding how best to supply the information to external PSAP organizations. But perhaps even more importantly is the fact that more than 88 percent of those commercial services featured fully automated positioning means. Indeed almost 77 percent of all of the services were powered by Cell ID, while 7.5 percent were using enhanced Cell ID and a further 4.5 percent using GPS technology. This shows that some crucial building blocks to build a pan-European E112 service are already in place. Setting forth rules for the proper transmission and usage of subscriber location data is one thing, but successfully coordinating network operators so that they are actually in a position to collect and provide this data is another matter.
Even with the attraction of commercial location-based services, CGALIES data has suggested that the costs of making a mobile operator “E112-ready” might extend to an additional US$12 million per operator. The presence of commercial location systems not only decreases the overall costs of enabling E112, but also provides an excellent means to recoup some of the necessary additional expenditure for routing the data to the emergency services.
The soon-to-be-announced EU-wide regulations about “location enhancing” 112 services are likely to stipulate that, where available, this data must be provided, along with originating network identification data and information concerning the likely reliability of the location information. All operators should also be maintaining reliable databases of subscriber location data, as well as carefully logging 112 call data for future reference, with mobile networks potentially having to route not just voice calls but also SMS emergency messages to PSAPs.
It will take some time to successfully coordinate the universal availability of E112 throughout Europe. But with the increasingly sophisticated developments in the commercial location-based services sector-and a carefully studied approach by EU authorities-enhanced emergency services can be introduced using commercial LBS to get some of the requisite cellular infrastructure into place. Barring any unforeseen developments, the EC is likely to carry out a review of its initiative in early 2005. If European cellular operators and PSAP authorities have not shown sufficient progress, it is then possible that that tighter regulations and requirements may be imposed.
