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The Covid-19 pandemic has brought accelerated growth to technology, digitization, and automation. And whether we’re ready or not, we are undergoing a substantial digital revolution all over the world. Innovation, agility, and market development are moving fast. In the last decade alone, we have seen huge leaps forward: SpaceX, virtual home assistants, driverless vehicles, virtual payment systems, cloud-based services, drones, AI, VR…to name but a small few.

But believe it or not, still in 2021, locating a 9-1-1/112/999 mobile caller presents a hugely significant challenge. Accurate verifiable dispatchable location, or a physical “door to knock on” during an emergency event, is not available, contrary to what many in the industry would have you believe (more on that later).

So, on March 31, 2021, ELi posted our first narrative on emergency mobile location. The objective was to start open conversation on the important challenges our industry faces, including that of location. We wanted to hear from, and speak with, like-minded industry professionals and advocates who are working HARD to make a difference.

We gained so much detailed insight, received so much positive feedback, and made quite a few new friends…so we are back…round 2 here we come!

Emergency Number Networks around the globe face similar challenges. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Ghana, Romania, Qatar, the US, or Sweden the obstacles remain pretty much the same: increasing call volumes and call handling to emergency centers, rising crime rates, increasing severity of crimes, decreasing resources, lower staff recruitment, dropping financial support or training, rising technological advancement (that you need to keep up with), high employee stress…and large, pandemic proportion, health crises and natural disasters.

These are some pretty significant obstacles to work around. But what intrigued us in March, and what intrigues us still, is how the challenge of locating an emergency mobile caller persists, but in comparison to the above, is a simple and elegant fix.

Over the coming weeks we’re going to talk further on dispatchable address, what it truly is, and what it really provides. We will take a hard look at what other location technologies and Next Gen services are currently being spoken about, or even deployed, and whether they are providing a true dispatchable address, or not.  

And then we might look into our crystal ball, to see what advantage accurate mobile location really provides, as we transition into our Next Generation Emergency Services…cue Star Trek music.