26.06.2024

Having discussed with representatives of the industry and institutions in the field during the Consultative Council, ANCOM adopted the decision reviewing the regulations on communications to the Single National System for Emergency Calls (SNUAU). The normative act facilitates the implementation of emergency communications through packet switching mobile technologies and will allow the SNUAU administrator to ensure considerably improved caller location identification, (sometimes within a few meters).

The decision was sent for publication in the Romanian Official Journal and will enter into force on the date of publication.

Adopted amendments

In the context of 3G and subsequently 2G switchoff, complementary to the development of 4G and 5G networks that use IP technology to transmit data, the Decision facilitates the use of this technology to take emergency calls and acquire appropriate location information for calls initiated from next-generation networks.

Moreover, the access of disabled end-users to emergency services will be ensured under conditions equivalent to those made available to other end-users, this Decision facilitating the deployment of adequate infrastructure for the implementation of multimedia emergency communications.

Interconnection based on circuit switching will continue to be used for a while as a backup solution for emergency call transmission, until the total migration to new technologies.

Smartphones with advanced functionalities contribute radically to better localization. In this regard, the draft decision also establishes a new obligation for mobile operators to submit to ANCOM a statistical situation with the terminals connected to the network, twice a year (by 30 June and by 31 December), specifying the name of the manufacturer, the name of the terminal and  the version of the terminal's operating system (to the extent that the provider has access to information on the version), as well as certain capabilities thereof. This information will be used for the dynamic evaluation, through statistics, of the percentage of terminals in the market that are capable of high-performance localization.

Context

The normative act follows the steps initiated by the Government Emergency Ordinance no. 48/2023 on some measures in the field of the Single National System for Emergency Calls, which requires the implementation of a set of technical solutions - for the first time in the realm of European emergency services - in order to improve the identification of the location of calls to the emergency number 112.

ANCOM's role is to establish the technical and economic conditions for making communications to SNUAU and the technical conditions for transmitting caller location and identification information, so as to ensure the availability of such information in accordance with the specific requirements established at the European Union level, while taking into account the particularities related to the functioning of the 112 emergency service at national level.