A spate of recent telecom network failures has emphasized the importance of accessing emergency services, including 911 calling and texting, during network outages. Emergency or disaster roaming enables access to emergency services during such network outages. Most emergency calls are made from cell phones, which in some markets could reach as high as 95% of all emergency calls. Headlines of persons unable to call emergency services because of network failures have raised the attention of regulators to this issue. In a few countries, regulators attempted to cajole mobile network operators to implement emergency roaming. MNOs for their part are hesitant due to the cost and complexity of implementing emergency roaming. However, it is hard for them to maintain their objections to emergency roaming after their networks suffer from a catastrophic outage.
In our newly published Insight Note “Emergency Roaming: Mitigating the Adverse Impact of Mobile Network Failures” we provide an overview of this topic.
Global emergency roaming activities
The following are links to complement the summary provided in the Insight Note:
- South Korea: Implemented a proprietary mode of emergency roaming for LTE and 5G networks: Link
- Japan: The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) undertook deliberations with Japanese MNO on emergency roaming. Link here to the First Report of the Study Group on Roaming Among Service Providers in a Time of Emergency (December 2022). Link here to the second report (June 30, 2023).
- US/FCC: Link here to the Mandatory Disaster Response Initiative (MDRI) adopted in June 2022.
Harmonizing nomenclature
This is an important issues that we reiterate again in this post. We need to develop clear definitions because emergency roaming is a nascent topic with different aspects that could lead to confusion. Thus, it is absolutely necessary to harmonize the nomenclature and establish a common baseline for the development and implementation of emergency roaming services.
To illustrate, a network failure could be due to a number of reasons (e.g. natural disaster, operational error, cybersecurity attack). A failure impacts a certain part of the network (e.g. radio access network, core network, service network). Therefore, it becomes necessary to define the conditions to trigger roaming, its implementation and the services it would enable.
Working with the ecosystem
Mobile network operators need to abandon their reluctance and adopt a proactive approach to define their strategy for the continuity of emergency services, such as 911 emergency voice calling and texting, during network failures. This includes collaborating with other MNOs, network equipment vendors, device vendors and standard bodies to progress the development of emergency roaming.
For its part, 3GPP is in the process of developing specifications for disaster roaming. See 3GPP TR 24.811 for technical specifications and 3GPP TS 23.501 for service requirements. However, 3GPP activities do not address all technologies (i.e. does not apply to 2G, 3G and 4G) and only considers radio access network outage.
Concluding thoughts
There are many complementary means to access emergency services during network outages. MNOs need to consider over-the-top messaging services, direct-to-cell services over low earth orbit satellites and software/embedded SIM solutions as potential solutions for emergency roaming. Japanese operators have implemented eSIM-based solutions to enable a form of emergency roaming (KDDI/SoftBank).