Nils Weidstam, a civil engineer and consultant to SOS Alarm, has been working closely with mobile operators to make the mobile positioning system a reality. The solution they have come up with means that operators can provide SOS Alarm with the exact location information of callers in distress, saving both time and, in some cases, lives.

Weidstam explains how it works: “When a person makes an emergency call on his mobile phone, the call is routed to the nearest emergency centre. Based on the caller’s telephone number, the operator who receives the call will know what municipality the person is calling from.

“If the information is not sufficient, the operator pushes a button to send out a request to the caller’s mobile network,” he says. “The network answers by providing the exact location of the caller. The information is displayed on a map in front of the operator who quickly contacts the required emergency services.”

Weidstam says the information SOS Alarm receives varies depending on the operator of the mobile network. “For instance, Telia has something called Timing advance, which measures the distance from the phone mast to the caller.”

Once the service is launched, SOS Alarm will pay for the information it receives from operators – as it does for all external information it receives.

“At the moment, we are negotiating the cost for positioning and it is likely there will be a fee for each successful request,” Weidstam says. “This is, of course, an incentive for the mobile network operators to provide a good service.”

There have been a number of challenges for Weidstam and his team to overcome. “One particular issue concerned roaming subscribers – both those based in Sweden and people visiting the country.

“We came up with a solution that gives SOS Alarm information from the network the caller is using at the moment they make the emergency call, irrespective of whether they are a roaming subscriber from another network in Sweden or abroad,” he says. “This is a very good solution because the billing operator isn’t relevant to SOS Alarm.”

SOS Alarm’s mobile positioning system is part of a wider initiative initiated by the European Union (EU). By ensuring that all member states implement such services, the EU hopes to save more lives and money. Weidstam says that Sweden estimates a saving of about SEK 200 million per year. “Normally, the first 15 seconds of an emergency call are very important,” he says. “Being able to find the location of the incident quickly is vital and cost-saving, especially if it is a fire or someone having a heart attack.”

Someone who knows the importance of a mobile positioning system is Janek Laev from Estonia, who manages the emergency centre in the capital Tallinn. The centre is the fourth largest in the country and handles about 2000 ambulance and fire emergency calls each day. For the past four years, it has used a mobile positioning system to help locate callers in trouble.

“The positioning system helps save lives by enabling the dispatchers to send rescue teams to the right location,” Laev says. “They can locate callers from mobile phones and fixed lines on their computer screen.”

Laev recalls a case of a car accident that may have ended tragically if positioning services had not been available: “A man called the emergency services and asked for an ambulance and fire engines,” he says. “He gave the location of the accident, but it was wrong. A quick search using the positioning system showed the dispatcher where the accident had really occurred and sent the rescue teams to the right place.”

This saved the rescue workers up to an hour, Laev says.

Estonia was the first country in Europe to deploy mobile positioning. Laev says the Estonian emergency services wanted to be at the forefront of such a development.

“The positioning service is definitely a good tool for our dispatchers,” Laev says. “But we still lack roaming agreements with the operators, both fixed and mobile, and the client server system is a bit too slow for us. If these two issues are solved, we will be able to use the system to its full potential.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen