Life or death: Your mobile phone's the difference?

Europeans want emergency services to be able to locate them through their mobile phones - and many are willing to switch operators to get it.

Eighty per cent of Europeans want this capability and 64 per cent would sign up with a new mobile company that allowed it, according to recent research commissioned by wireless location technology company TruePosition.

They want it to be accurate, too. More than two-thirds of those surveyed want to be located within 50m and for the technology to work indoors and outdoors.

However, the most widely used mobile location technology in the EU, Cell-ID, provides accuracy of within 250m in cities and 1km in rural areas. GPS, another popular location technology, does not work well indoors.

The desires of the Europeans surveyed are in line with the E-911 regulations in the US, which stipulate location requirements based on technology. For GPS, phone companies must be able to pinpoint a caller's location within 50m to 150m and, for network techniques such as triangulation of cellular towers, between 100m and 300m.

Unlike in the US, the current EU legislation governing this issue, the E-112 Recommendation passed last year, does not stipulate accuracy and only requires phone operators (both fixed and mobile) to provide location information to emergency services "within the technological possibilities of the network".

Graham Curry, assistant operations manager for the Lancashire Ambulance Service, said 50 per cent of emergency services calls are made with mobile phones and each year approximately one million emergency callers in the EU are unable to indicate their location.

"The ability to provide accurate location information via mobile phones could mean the difference between life and death," he said.