Saving Time Means Saving Lives

EML was developed because there continues to be an ongoing issue around “accurate and precise location” for emergency mobile calls.

Not every mobile caller knows their location. Maybe they’re in an unfamiliar area, unable to communicate, or the call becomes disconnected. As a consequence, emergency help can, and does, arrive too late, and this can come with devastating consequences.

Before mobile phones, we had the legacy landline system. Each landline was/is registered to a civic/residential address, and finding the caller’s location was more simple.

Mobile phone location is more complicated. PSAPs still use combinations of cell tower triangulation or ID, GPS, and crowdsourced Wi-Fi to narrow down the search and route and dispatch the call, but this process provides only an estimated horizontal search area, which can be 50 meters or 3 km in size. Urban and indoor locations (including multi-level and/or underground buildings) are especially challenging due to urban canyoning and Wi-Fi distortion, resulting in little visibility beyond a building’s front door.

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in the US states that over 10,000 lives are lost every year because the emergency call information doesn’t include an accurate dispatchable address and a similar number of lives are lost due to call “misrouted” where calls are directed to an incorrect dispatch center or PSAP jurisdiction.

Where do I go?

The Emergency Service Number industry needs dispatchable location

Section 506 of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) RAY BAUM’s Act requires a caller’s “dispatchable location”, be relayed to a 9-1-1/112 call center.

The European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) makes it mandatory for EU members to make use of handset-derived location information.