from Hacker News

The number's up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

by Logans_Run on 5/21/24, 6:42 PM with 28 comments

• by rindalir on 5/21/24, 7:57 PM

  I can't be the only person to think the correct universal number should be 0118.999.88199.9119.725...3

• by kayodelycaon on 5/21/24, 7:10 PM

  Apple has started with this "Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone" https://support.apple.com/en-us/101573

• by happymellon on 5/22/24, 4:20 AM

  The solution is to require tech companies to do something?

  I don't know what rock they've been living under, but generally speaking putting requirements on companies appears to just mean that they agree and then don't do it.

  Unless there is confidence that reneging on requirements would come with consequences this seems like a dead idea.

• by dirtyhippiefree on 5/21/24, 8:33 PM

  The article has a link to another on The Hill indicating that American 911 is a patchwork and not nationwide…

  https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3561535-its-time-to-r...

• by chrisandchris on 5/21/24, 8:52 PM

  The article links to [1] which says

  > Nearly half of the 80,000 calls received daily by BT operators in the UK do not involve requests for help.

  I would never have estimated such a high quote of unnecessary emergency calls.

  And that‘s a fun fact

  > Experts chose 999 rather than 111 for technical reasons. In pre-optical fibre days telegraph wires rubbed together in the wind and transmitted the equivalent of a 111 call

  [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090302014433/http://www.btplc....

• by canucker2016 on 5/21/24, 7:33 PM

  For fast connection in time of emergency, calling 999 (or worse 000) on a rotary-dial phone seems tortuous - '9' - followed by several agonizing moments as the dial returns to its resting position, only to have to repeat it two more times?

  Touch-tone dialing makes all the emergency numbers O(1) instead of O(N).

• by brian_herman on 5/21/24, 7:10 PM

  Could they use the smart phone's gps to send out their current location?

• by mikhailfranco on 5/22/24, 8:43 AM

  Recommending satellites may have seemed plausible in [2023], but not when it is reposted the week after a major solar flare (CME).

• by politician on 5/21/24, 7:13 PM

  One killer app for Starlink is solving the problem of contacting emergency services globally like what they're doing with T-mobile.

• by fragmede on 5/21/24, 7:13 PM

  How very British. It's a nobal idea, for the parts of the world where calling emergency services is useful. where there even are emergency services, where emergency services aren't the police coming to shoot your autistic brother or black friend. as the article points out, the problems at this scale are psychological, and I don't know that we're still able to deal with that kind of problem given how we handled covid.

• by anthk on 5/21/24, 9:45 PM

  >satellite

  Rain happens. AM radio works everywhere. And a receiver is dirt cheap.

• by advisedwang on 5/21/24, 8:34 PM

  The article glibly glosses over the requirement for line of sight (or at least low attenuation) to satellites, but a great deal of emergencies happen in places where you will not be able to connect to a satellite emergency system. Frankly a 100% satellite based system is a complete non-starter.

• by Logans_Run on 5/22/24, 12:15 PM

  This section of the article is what chilled my blood more than a little ....

  "... giving Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and whoever that they include emergency universal comms on their satellite constellations to get permission to fly, and we're good. Emergency call services are very low bandwidth, which is very cheap, very power frugal, and very reliable to add to high bandwidth satellites and low cost devices on the ground. Because we're talking universal standards here, we can bake in solid location detection that we know will work. You can build the user bits into standalone devices or as part of a mobile phone, as long as it's a simple one-button activation."

  ... what gave me pause for concern was the thought that an otherwise obvious idea with a cheap and easy solution runs the risk of establishing Elon and Starlink into one of those "Too Big / Too Essential To Fail" types of corporation.