RescueRanger
Meme Lord
This is an Old Article from me on the old PDF written well before the adaption of the universal 911 national emergency helpline in 2021
Pakistan has a mishmsh of emergency hotlines and helplines, some of which I have included for you below:
However, when you look at this massive list of telephone numbers, you have to ask yourself, who is staffing these numbers? What is the call handling SLA? What is the brand equity and consumer confidence for each of these numbers.
Now, Pakistan already has two very well established emergency numbers, these are 15 (Founded by the late Naasir Khan Durrani in 1998) and Rescue 1122 (founded by Dr. Rizwan Nasir in 2004). Both these numbers and their associated brands have acceptance among the public and varying degrees of recognition as being bonafide emergency numbers.
One of the issues that concerns me, based on my experience and research concerns the call routing, call handling and resourcing of these calls.
Figure 1: Example of a unified EOC: Emergency Operations Centre. Copyright Rescue Ranger 2021
Secondly, who is going to be the lead agency for handling the call routing. If we look at the US (911) or UK(999) systems, these are routed via several national call centres operated by AT&T in USA and BT in the U.K. When someone calls 999 in the UK, this call reaches ones of several BT call centres, the operator will ask the caller "Emergency, which service?" and will direct the call to the relevant regional emergency service contact centre. In the case of a silent caller the BT operator has access to the callers "subscriber" details and can pass these to the police if a call-back or visit is required.
Please see the example video below:
Figure 2:Example data flow of a call to the EOC from start to finish (C) RescueRanger 2021.
Now whilst in the US and UK the callers subscriber details are available to the emergency contact centres via BT or AT&T, etc, in Pakistan there is no such agreement to legally "intercept" the originating subscriber and pass these details onto the receiver (in this case for example Rescue 1122). As of January, 2021 there were 173.2 Million mobile connections in Pakistan(1), the majority of inbound calls to Rescue 1122 are cellular calls and this is where the problem comes:
Figure 3: Example of cellular call routing from tx(sender) via BTS to MSC to rx(receiver).
The above scenario raises a number of concerns, firstly the issue of abuse of a "toll free" emergency number. Rescue 1122 received 20,555,131 calls during 2019 across Punjab. Out of these only 1,192,044 were emergency calls. Rescue 1122 received 19,363,087 calls that were not related to any kind of emergency. (2)
The second issue comes from the possibility that the caller may terminate the call before contact details can be obtained or incident location can be ascertained, poor cellular coverage and dead-zones can also act as mitigation factors for the safety and welfare of the service user.
Figure 4: An example of how PTA may facilitate caller intercept in the case of a "silent" or anonymous caller.
The third area of concern is that of redundancies, if there is only one truncated network providing unified communication to the entire national infrastructure of emergency services, the partial or complete loss of service due to power outage or similar unmitigated crisis may create a critical incident in terms of service users unable to access emergency services, therefore a network with multiple redundancies is one consideration that needs to be addressed.
Figure 5: Example of network redundancy, allowing the (EOC: Emergency Operations Centre) to automatically switch from PSTN to GSM/Cellular network in the event of an outage.
Beyond resilience and redundancies there are the issues of interoperability, coordination and communication between multiple agencies and service providers in an emergency situation. I have written in detail about this, you can read more about this here: Leadership in Emergencies | Pakistan Defence
Pakistan has a mishmsh of emergency hotlines and helplines, some of which I have included for you below:
- Edhi 115
- Chhipa Ambulance 1020
- Sindh Peoples Ambulance 1023
- Rescue 1122
- Rescue 15
- Rangers 1101
- Anti Terrorism Hotline 1135
- Pakistan Medical Assistance Hotline 1166
- Aman Ambulance 1021
- Fire Service 16
- Child Protection 1121
- Cyber Crime 9911
- Covid Helpline 1166
- Police Corruption 8787
- Disaster Management Hotline 1129
- Highway and Motorway Police 130
- Gas Emergency Hotline 1199
- Electricity Emergency 118
- Water Board 111-305-305
- Coast Guard Search and Rescue 021-99215251
- Wildlife Animal Rescue: 051-2601912
However, when you look at this massive list of telephone numbers, you have to ask yourself, who is staffing these numbers? What is the call handling SLA? What is the brand equity and consumer confidence for each of these numbers.
Now, Pakistan already has two very well established emergency numbers, these are 15 (Founded by the late Naasir Khan Durrani in 1998) and Rescue 1122 (founded by Dr. Rizwan Nasir in 2004). Both these numbers and their associated brands have acceptance among the public and varying degrees of recognition as being bonafide emergency numbers.
One of the issues that concerns me, based on my experience and research concerns the call routing, call handling and resourcing of these calls.
Figure 1: Example of a unified EOC: Emergency Operations Centre. Copyright Rescue Ranger 2021
Secondly, who is going to be the lead agency for handling the call routing. If we look at the US (911) or UK(999) systems, these are routed via several national call centres operated by AT&T in USA and BT in the U.K. When someone calls 999 in the UK, this call reaches ones of several BT call centres, the operator will ask the caller "Emergency, which service?" and will direct the call to the relevant regional emergency service contact centre. In the case of a silent caller the BT operator has access to the callers "subscriber" details and can pass these to the police if a call-back or visit is required.
Please see the example video below:
Figure 2:Example data flow of a call to the EOC from start to finish (C) RescueRanger 2021.
Now whilst in the US and UK the callers subscriber details are available to the emergency contact centres via BT or AT&T, etc, in Pakistan there is no such agreement to legally "intercept" the originating subscriber and pass these details onto the receiver (in this case for example Rescue 1122). As of January, 2021 there were 173.2 Million mobile connections in Pakistan(1), the majority of inbound calls to Rescue 1122 are cellular calls and this is where the problem comes:
Figure 3: Example of cellular call routing from tx(sender) via BTS to MSC to rx(receiver).
The above scenario raises a number of concerns, firstly the issue of abuse of a "toll free" emergency number. Rescue 1122 received 20,555,131 calls during 2019 across Punjab. Out of these only 1,192,044 were emergency calls. Rescue 1122 received 19,363,087 calls that were not related to any kind of emergency. (2)
The second issue comes from the possibility that the caller may terminate the call before contact details can be obtained or incident location can be ascertained, poor cellular coverage and dead-zones can also act as mitigation factors for the safety and welfare of the service user.
Figure 4: An example of how PTA may facilitate caller intercept in the case of a "silent" or anonymous caller.
The third area of concern is that of redundancies, if there is only one truncated network providing unified communication to the entire national infrastructure of emergency services, the partial or complete loss of service due to power outage or similar unmitigated crisis may create a critical incident in terms of service users unable to access emergency services, therefore a network with multiple redundancies is one consideration that needs to be addressed.
Figure 5: Example of network redundancy, allowing the (EOC: Emergency Operations Centre) to automatically switch from PSTN to GSM/Cellular network in the event of an outage.
Beyond resilience and redundancies there are the issues of interoperability, coordination and communication between multiple agencies and service providers in an emergency situation. I have written in detail about this, you can read more about this here: Leadership in Emergencies | Pakistan Defence
