Where are you?
Multiple stakeholder engagement to deliver a solution to share caller location with relevant Emergency Services..
My involvement started as is often the case with a passing conversation with officials in a meeting at the European Commission Office building, the Berlaymont, yes the one in EC logo almost ten years ago!
We were talking about the use of the then new Galileo satellite navigation system and it’s potential use for emergency services, there was some surprise when I mentioned that most smartphones at the time actually used wifi, cell-id and other techniques in addition to satellite systems to provide users with their location inside buildings.
So began a multi-year activity working with Handset manufacturers, Mobile operators, Competing multinational technology companies, International standards bodies, National and International privacy regulators and the press to fundamentally share the “Blue Dot” you see in the Maps Application on your smartphone with emergency services around the world automatically.
The system would become known as “Advanced Mobile Location” and it almost certainly is available on your mobile phone today and will swing into action automatically when you dial 999, 112 or 911 and share you location with emergency services with an accuracy of a few metres.
“AML is an answer to one of the eternal problems in emergency services: getting the geolocation of the cellular caller that is crucial especially in country like Finland. The best innovation in Emergency Response Centre business in a decade.”.
– Marko Nieminen, 112 Finland
The system was deployed across Europe within just a few years as it was developed in a rather “scrappy” fashion by diverse teams initially working at British Telecom, T-Mobile, HTC and Google building a working prototype that was then demonstrable to stakeholders quickly even if this resulted in a solution that was not the most elegant from an engineering point of view.
My work here involved brining together members of a technology ecosystem, which had often different views of the market, Emergency Services organisations naturally have a conservative approach to new technology deployment and government agencies with different levels of responsibility for both policy setting and regulation. Key was painting the picture of a service that could be deployed quickly with minimal change to existing complex technical infrastructure, using an approach of rapid prototyping rather than long requirements gathering exercises.
A major advocate of AML and the rapid prototyping approach was the European trade body based in Brussels the European Emergency Number Association, the speaking and general networking provided by organisation like this are vital in gaining initially understanding and then driving adoption.
Eventually a more formal approach is required of course and I brought my Standards Development experience to help the creation of the “Transporting Handset Location to PSAPs for
Emergency Communications – Advanced Mobile Location” Technical Specification TS 103 625 published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
An informal approach of Industry Best Practice was only able to take the deployment of even a lifesaving technology so far, so the next stage in my involvement with AML was working with various national regulators as sharing user location with emergency services was mandated by the European Electronic Communications Code, this involved the development of test strategies to validate compliance.
What’s Next ?
Next Generation mobile communications will move all of the current services delivered to mobile and landline devices to an IP based platform, e.g. the same underlying technology as the internet and will bring many advantages to sharing more complex multimedia data as well as location.
How we share location with Emergency Services will of course change to make the most of these additional capabilities…
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