The U.S. isn’t the only place in the world where government and telecommunications industry players are considering how they might alter regulations and infrastructure to address the massive uptake of mobile and texting by the populace. This is being explored down under this as well.
Australia’s federal government in July revealed it will be reviewing whether and when it makes sense to expand the national Triple Zero emergency service network to allow people to reach emergency services via SMS, VoIP, and mobile applications as well as standard voice.
A group called the Triple Zero Awareness Work Group for iOS and Android (News - Alert), which has built the Emergency+ smartphone app that displays GPS coordinates on the phone so users can read them to operators, may be part of the impetus for this discussion, as Australia’s Communications Minister Malcom Turnbull reportedly referenced this effort in discussing the emergency services topic.
But other groups, like the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association and the Communications Alliance are also pushing for the expansion. In fact, the two telecom industry groups collaborated on a submission emphasizing that enabling emergency services to leverage wireless technologies like GPS, and allow smartphone users to share photos and video with emergency personal, could have positive impacts.
Interestingly, the two groups also noted that some of these new modes of emergency services might not be free or always available to end users due to wireless data charges they might incur from their cellular service providers and the possibility of their prepaid bucket running dry.
Bringing wireless services and technologies like texting has also been a matter of debate – and recent regulatory action – in the U.S. In fact, just last month the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules requiring text messaging providers to enable people in the U.S. to text their requests for emergency services personnel to come and help them. The major wireless carriers in the U.S. already have this capability in place, and all others are now required to do the same by the end of the year.
However, that doesn’t mean all the pieces are in place to enable emergency texting. The Public Safety Answering Points that accept emergency calls today and dispatch emergency services are not necessarily ready to accept texts today, and they have been fairly slow in adopting this capability, Timothy Lorello (News - Alert), senior vice president and chief marketing officer at TCS, a leading provider of text messaging, told TMCnet in an interview earlier this month. There is now federal mandate as to when PSAPs need to support, emergency texting, he explained. In any case, he said, some PSAP managers are now trying to justify NG111 as a whole by emphasizing the need to support emergency texting. NG911 involves upgrading PSAP PBXs and connections to IP-based infrastructure.
Edited by Alisen Downey