NZ's NGCC onboards Emergency Caller Location Information Service

New Zealand’s Emergency Caller Location Information (ECLI) Service has been ‘rehomed’ from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) into Next Generation Critical Communications (NGCC), the organisation responsible for developing the country’s new Public Safety Network to support the emergency services.

The ECLI Service was launched by the New Zealand Government in May 2017 to provide emergency services with the likely location of the mobile device from which a person has made a 111 call, and therefore their likely location. This location data helps emergency services speed up their response to an incident, reducing both the time it takes to check the caller’s location and the average dispatch time to the scene.

“The ECLI Service has been proven to save lives and is particularly useful in situations where a caller can’t easily communicate with the 111 call taker, which could be for a variety of reasons,” said NGCC Director Steve Ferguson. For example, the service has helped emergency services find callers involved in vehicle accidents, house and rural fires, people lost while tramping, and people having medical events.

According to Ferguson, bringing the ECLI Service into NGCC allows the organisation to leverage its emergency sector focus and capabilities, and to deepen its support for those who help keep the community safe. He added that NGCC is well placed to evolve location information services within the emergency services ecosystem, given the organisation’s experience of critical communications technologies as well as its close and longstanding relationships with the first responder agencies.

“Globally, emergency services are increasingly benefiting from the precise, rapid location information that cellular technology can provide to help quickly find people and prevent emergencies by warning people in specific geographic areas. The technology will continue to get more precise and useful,” he said.

Ferguson said the transfer of responsibility from MBIE to NGCC will take effect immediately but with a staggered transition of staff, technology and commercial arrangements to ensure the quality of service is maintained over the period of transition. Any location data provided by the service remains subject to strict and very robust privacy and access controls to protect callers’ personal information.

“In time, I anticipate that this sophisticated technology will become an enormously useful component of NGCC’s offerings to the emergency services alongside the Public Safety Network’s new infrastructure and services,” Ferguson said.

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