Apple announces new emergency SOS system for calls

As Canada’s major telecommunications companies face pressure to help Canadians reach emergency responders in the event of a major power outage, Apple is rolling out a new service that will accomplish just that. doing.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant said its new Emergency SOS system, available on iPhone 14 devices in Canada this week, will allow people without cellular or Wi-Fi service to connect to a satellite to report an emergency or It helps to call for help and in remote areas.

“There’s always going to be places like national parks and rural areas where cell towers can’t fully cover them, so when there’s an emergency, it becomes a problem very quickly,” says Maxime Veron, Apple’s director of iPhone product marketing. said Mr.

“Imagine, for example, that you’re hiking and you’re alone and you fall and break something, or you roll your ankle, and night comes and you haven’t seen anyone for an hour. You need help. I don’t know if I can get back to the track or the campground, so what do I do?”

Users will be able to tap to answer a series of questions, he said — what is the emergency and who needs help? — to determine which emergency personnel are best suited to respond. . It can also notify emergency contacts programmed into the phone, sending their location and the nature of the emergency.

Their phones then attempt to connect to one of Globalstar’s 24 low-orbit satellites, relaying responses and contact requests to public safety response points, call centers where emergency responders can be dispatched to reach loved ones. increase.

A connection is most likely to be established when the sky and horizon are clearly visible, but trees, hills, mountains, canyons and tall structures can block the signal, Veron said. I’m here. If the signal is blocked, the phone indicates which direction the user must move to attempt a connection.

“Connecting an iPhone to a satellite flying 15,000 miles an hour and more than 800 miles up in the air is very difficult, and is actually a very different challenge than connecting to a stationary cell tower,” says Apple. said Arun Mathias, vice president of President of Wireless Technologies and Ecosystems.

“Existing satellite phones rely on huge antennas, which often protrude from the device, and obviously don’t work with the iPhone, so we had to invent something else to make sure the iPhone could communicate. .”

The creation of this system began with Apple discovering frequencies, signals that help connect devices to networks. This frequency was already used by satellites, and we made hardware and software changes so iPhones could connect without bulky antennas and compress messages to emergency responders. .

The company was able to reduce the average message size by a third. That means sending messages takes about a third of the time, Mathias said.

Apple has worked with telecom companies to enable iPhones to move from satellite to cellular service or Wi-Fi, but such companies are not involved in the actual operation of the Emergency SOS service, he added. I got

The service is free for the first two years, but Apple has not said if or what it will charge beyond that period. The service has a demo mode that allows people to test it without asking for help.

The launch comes as Canada works on how to best facilitate access to emergency services in the event of a telecommunications network outage.

Last week, Telus Corp. experienced a power outage in parts of southern Ontario, preventing customers from calling 911 from landlines.

On July 8th, Rogers Communications Inc. suffered an even broader service disruption that left millions of Canadians unable to send distress calls to police, paramedics and fire departments.

Despite offers of help from rival Bell and Telus, Rogers was unable to transfer customers to competing carriers.

Nor could it shut down the radio access network that would have automatically connected customers to another carrier for 911 calls.

The federal government has ordered Rogers and other telecom companies to develop backup plans to prevent similar disruptions.

The two companies reached a formal agreement in September to “secure and guarantee” emergency roaming and other mutual assistance during the major service outage.

This report by the Canadian Press was first published on November 15, 2022.