Ofcom welcomes Emergency Service Mobile Phone Location

Ofcom has welcomed work by the UK's telecommunications sector in developing technology that will help the emergency services to locate people calling 999 from their mobile phones.

Enhanced location information will mean that callers in unfamiliar surroundings can be located and reached more speedily by the Fire, Police, Ambulance or Coastguard services.

The system has been developed by the UK's mobile operators – O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 – and by BT and Cable & Wireless, the companies that connect 999 calls dialled from mobile phones to the emergency services. The initiative was directed by Oftel, the previous telecommunications regulator whose responsibilities have now been assumed by Ofcom.

Peter Walker, Senior Adviser for Ofcom's Technology Strategy group, said: 'More than 43M 999 calls are made each year and more than 50% of those are from mobile handsets. The enhanced service represents a major step forward in helping the emergency services to respond to calls from mobile users as speedily as possible.'

The system has been developed because mobile users are not always able to readily identify the place from which they are making an emergency call, particularly when phoning from a vehicle to report an incident on a motorway or other road system. The new system will allow approximate locations to be identified by control rooms as calls are connected. It will also help in the identification of hoax callers.

Fixed line callers already benefit from the facility. A previous study of location information on fixed line calls showed that, on average, 30 seconds could be saved in the despatch of emergency vehicles for each call.

The implementation maintains the UK's lead in Europe with regard to the emergency telephone service. The specification developed in the UK for supporting the communication of the location data has been adopted by ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute).

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