UKH

This thread https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/rock_talk/what_info_can_emergency_service...
five years ago seemed to leave everyone pretty sceptical about the scenario that was proposed. However, in 2014, that was a very embryonic service on a small handset population and things since have moved on. Although the complexity and diversity of legacy emergency telephone systems across Europe has been providing many barriers to implementation, we are now approaching the stage where the system proposed in that thread is not only operational but steadily advancing.

Where this is going is that when all current related projects, plans, and system updates are complete, emergency calls in the UK and many other countries across Europe will be accompanied by location information accurate to 5m (Galileo!) as the normal working situation. Clearly, that's like turning night into day for many emergencies!

So what are the barriers to implementation?

- Police forces not updating their command and control systems to include AML.
- Mobile phone operating systems not updated.
- Many mobile phone still without Galileo (less accurate with GPS/GLONASS).
- 999 roaming (LSS) implementation still in development.

Currently, if you have a handset with Galileo, the handset OS is updated, you have home network coverage, and are calling a control room with AML implementation, then that control room should receive a data stream that locates you to within 15m and possibly 5m. 

That perfect solution occurs today in the UK for a minority of emergency calls. For a larger proportion of emergency calls the system is improving location. We can reasonably expect that as the years go by and phones, satellite systems, network handover protocols, control rooms software and call-taker training are all updated, the majority of emergency calls will have high accuracy location.

AML - EENA
Advanced Mobile Location (AML) is the term used by the European Emergency Number Association (EENA). Other organisations involved use different names for same system or parts of the system. For instance, Emergency Location System (ELS) may be used by Google to describe the Android implementation. BT and some police forces may use Enhanced Information for Emergency Service Calls (EIESC). 

OPERATING SYSTEMS & HANDSETS
The OS should run AML protocols, including switching on and off location services, without the need for your intervention, whenever an emergency call is made. Android Gingerbread or later, if updated, should operate with AML. Apple iOS 11.3 or later, running on iPhone 5s or later, should operate with AML. Run updates on you phone OS to make sure you have this facility.

GALILEO
All UK handsets with GNSS locations services receive GPS, many also GLONASS, a few newer ones Galileo and some also Beidou. Galileo is the European one that will give this system its full stunning accuracy. Something to consider when buying your next phone. 

I always find it fascinating what's involved in delivering projects that to a layperson sound straightforward "My phone knows where it is. It should tell that to the emergency services!" translates to quite a long list of hardware and software requirements for several organisations.

Agreed. The processes involved in simply making and receiving a call on a mobile network, (and keeping it connected as you transition between cells), are in themselves complex.

Have you been reading promotional blurb from ESA again...?

Galileo really won't provide a significant improvement in accuracy for consumer devices.

Anyway, regardless of the slight increase in positional accuracy that may be provided by Galileo, in urban environments, you will still be mostly limited by the urban canyon effect.

I have a it on good authority from a control room operator that they can locate you but are not allowed to due to privacy laws. 
They can triangulate an approximate location using phone masts and then work out whereabouts along a road you are, but are not allowed to use other methods. 

The intended spec for mass-market equipment is 1m. That is for open terrain and plenty sky with a full constellation. No sooner will the full spec constellation be in service than Gen2 will be coming off the drawing board. Thirty to forty years newer than Navstar, not degraded every time somebody wants to start a war, and already advancing toward a second generation of flying infrastructure. So I am not likely to back away from the 5m figure. 

Kind of depends on what you mean by consumer devices! If your in agriculture and into precision farming then your tractor/combine/drill gps (the football sized round lump you see on the cab roof) consumer device can currently get you an accuracy of 10cm, dependent on what license your willing to pay for! Pay a bit more for a base station and that can come down to less than 4cm, typically 2cm!

I believe that at least some of the emergency services can make use of What Three Words locations, which pinpoint your location to a square sized three metres by three metres. Of course this relies on the caller having What Three Words installed on his phone and relaying the location to the operator.

I have Galileo as an option on my Garmin running watch. I find it less accurate than the GPS/Glonass option, although the antenna and chipset might well be the limiting factor.

Everybody look up at the top of the page. Yes, we're on the Hill Talk forum. OS Grid Reference is the preferred positioning system for land SAR in Great Britain. The system I describe starts with Lat-Long; another open source and unchanging system; and police command and control systems typically convert that to OS full numeric grid reference. Proprietary positioning systems have nothing to do with this.

And is still subject to GNSS accuracy. It's just an alternate coordinate system.

It may be 30-40 years later than GPS, but the SIS is pretty much identical for the consumer positioning service (E1 Open Service) (and exactly the same as GPS L1C service). The improvements in accuracy are down to a slightly better constellation configuration. The chip rate is identical to the GPS C/A code (1023Mcps).

The E5 Open Service does use a 10230Mcps code rate, so that would give improved accuracy (I suspect this is the basis of the quoted 1m target accuracy), but you'd then need an E5 receiver, rather than being able to use the same E1 receiver you're using for GPS. I suspect it's unlikely that you will get many phone chipsets going to the trouble of implementing the E5 OS. I note that Wiki reports that, of 140 Galileo-capable smartphones, only 9 were E1/E5 dual-band capable.

Selective Availability was disabled in 2000. The US stated in 2001 that it did not intend to ever turn it back on again, and satellites launched post-2007 are not capable of applying SA.

GPS with SBAS will regularly achieve 3m accuracy. Of course, that SBAS improvement will be significantly degraded in ground-feature-rich environments (as the corrections are for tropo and iono errors, and can have no knowledge of the local receiver multipath environment).

The Galileo programme has also been running for more than twenty years, which pegs back that technical development somewhat... I worked on ESA's golden reference simulator (GSVF-2) fifteen years ago, so you'll have to excuse me if my memory of the technical details is a bit rusty...

The Open Service, and in particular, free for use by a small, low-power, handheld device, i.e. a smartphone.

Agricultural use to the accuracy you specified would require using one of the higher-precision, paid-for Galileo services. Or, as you suggest, you could use a real-time kinematic receiver (which requires a much bigger antenna, hence the 'football sized round lump', and more sophisticated receiver), or a local reference station and differential correction. But you can do that with GPS.

I think you may have identified the crux of the route there. AML has been out there for 5 years and not complete yet. Galileo prototypes were around a lot earlier than that. None of this, including location services on phones, has reached its full maturity yet. 

Just as a side note, it's interesting to look at some alternate (app based) services from countries late to the AML to see how the AML could be improved upon (or complemented). Some national apps send a geoloc. SMS before the actual call (possibly better chance of contact), some even add other info like your health information and your emergency contacts as well. One Czech app now works with all of that with Slovak and even Austrian (Alps) rescue services, I think including the additional information, although I belive it took them a few years to to even get full country coverage in the home country, not even counting the mountain rescue associations - which took some more time. 

And even in the EU, it's not so easy implementing it all on all the national services level (at least in some countries, the voluntary / semi-voluntary mountain rescue associations are not part of the AML yet. Especially since some rescue services in some countries and mountain areas crossing few state borders can be either state run or semi-voluntary depending on the country you are in...

Still, it all sounds good and I would love to be able to just call and for everything to work - there is a hope of that, although it's not been so easy getting the different systems to work together. What was the EU deadline for AML to be implemented EU-wide? 2020?

Another improvement that may affect mountain safety in a positive manner is the recent agreement on Shared Rural Network. This is a scheme that the four UK MNO have come up with to prevent Ofcom getting on their case about percentage coverage. A couple of weeks ago Ofcom issued a media release welcoming the plan and stating their intention to make it legally binding by writing it into licences. 

So this advances beyond the existing paired collaborations between O2 and Vodafone under CTIL and the between EE (BT) and Three. All four will be involved in infrastructure sharing in the rural areas where none of them can afford to go it alone and the costs will be shared in a way that puts the greatest load on those with the least existing coverage. 

What is also happening is that O2 and Vodafone's mast company, CTIL (Cornerstone), will morph into TowerCo, part of which will be sold off. This will help to finance Voda's incurable addiction to acquisition. Whether the change is a good or a bad thing for the end-user remains to be seen. 

I'm not sure the GDPR regulations (privacy laws)  prevent you from gaining this data.

GDPR provides for several "lawful purposes" for processing peoples data without permission, 

Here are two examples from the ICO web page

(d) Vital interests: the processing is necessary to protect someone’s life.

(e) Public task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law.

Neither require permission/consent.  This allows many public & private organisations to use you data legally and without permission.

Maybe. All he said was they’re not allowed access to that information. 

I wonder whether that relates to missing persons (who have not implied permission through making a call). Certainly in a Scottish jurisdiction that situation has always required authorisation from an officer of a certain rank and appointment.

As for the situation with GDPR, it's explicitly not there to kill you.