"Davidm" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 3 Jun 2021 14:28:30 -0700 (PDT), Mathew Newton
wrote:

On Thursday, 3 June 2021 at 21:21:37 UTC+1, NY wrote:
I was impressed when my wife called in an accident while we were driving
on
the A1 a few years ago. The emergency operator didn't need to be told
where
we were and said "ah yes, I can see you've just passed the turning to
Kirk
Smeaton, heading north". The phone had its GPS turned on (we were
recording
a track on Viewranger) so I wonder if the location is automatically
passed
to the 999 operator if GPS is enabled.

Yes, it's called Advanced Mobile Location (AML). It's been supported in
the UK for a number of years now as BT (who run the first line operator
assistance centres) were one of its developers.

Google's implementation (in Android) is called Emergency Location Service
(ELS) and there's a bit of info about how it works he

https://crisisresponse.google/emerge.../how-it-works/
It seems that it does rely on you having mobile data on your phone
turned on.
As I'm just on a payg arrangement (not even a contract) I don't
normally have it switched on, ever since on holiday one year and
loosing £40 of credit overnight when the bloody phone decided to do a
software update over a slow link (cruise ship).

No, it says it can use either HTTPS (which needs mobile data) or Data SMS
(which I'm presuming doesn't - unless *data* SMS uses a different carrier to
ordinary SMS).

It says the "Location is computed on the handset" - does this mean that GPS
must be turned on, or does it use some other technology? Maybe ELS
temporarily turns on GPS even if it is turned off in the phone's pull-down
menu of receivers (GPS, Wifi, mobile data, Bluetooth).