In an equally surprising and sensible development, emergency 000 calls made from mobiles will now deliver ramped-up location info to emergency services. That’s pretty great news, especially in situations where verbally confirming your location might be pretty difficult, dangerous, or if you’re in totally unfamiliar territory.
Or, all of the above.
The Australian Media and Communications Authority recently revealed the tag-team effort between Optus, Vodafone, and Telstra has resulted in an upgraded system across the board. They’re now required to shoot their most accurate location info straight through. Fair crack of the whip, guys.
The new system will shoot along caller info based on their location within the mobile network. That means if you’re in strife in the dead centre of town, the nearby build-up of phone-system base stations could potentially clue emergency services onto your location within 50 metres.
Gizmodo reports that before these developments, mobile calls to 000 – which make up a whopping two thirds of all emergency calls – didn’t pass any location info through to emergency services before this amendment.
Calls from landlines, which are obviously tied to physical addresses, do already shoot that info along; that’s all well and good, if you’re safely within a few metres of one when shit goes down.
If you’ve made it this far, we applaud your concern at the state of our emergency call system, ’cause it’s actually truly-duly important, and we don’t tend to think about it ’til we need it.
As a reward, check out this recent story of a loose bloke getting stuck in an airshaft at Crown Casino, and imagine how much easier his life would’ve been if he had access to this fancy-pants new upgrade.
