"Not all those who wander are lost"

J.R.R. Tolkien

The sad truth of the matter is that some who wander are lost. And then they need to call for help. But how can someone who is lost explain where they are?

The good news for us in New Zealand is that we have a special world-leading system that our emergency services can use to locate someone's position whenever they make an emergency call - the Emergency Caller Location Information service (ECLI). This service is overseen by the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE).

About the Emergency Caller Location Information Service

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The ECLI Service enables 111 emergency call takers to receive automatically generated geographical information about the likely location of a caller when a 111 call is made from a mobile device on a cellular network.

The Location Area Service (LAS) system turns that data into information about your mobile device’s likely location.

Authorised emergency service providers — New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, St John and Wellington Free Ambulance — are allowed to use this location information to help them verify where you are calling from, so they can respond to the emergency as quickly as possible.

Each year, there are more than 2 million calls to emergency services. In 2016, more than 80% of calls to 111 were made from a mobile phone. In the same year the New Zealand Police recorded over 8,100 incidents where they had to make a special information request to a network provider for a caller’s location. The ECLI Service helps to reduce this figure by providing automatic access to location information about emergency callers.

Accuracy of ECLI

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The level of location accuracy depends on a number of factors such as the type of mobile phone and the location source available.

A precise location solution is available on Android and iOS smartphones. Location data is provided by Google’s Android Emergency Location service and Apple’s Advanced Mobile Location for iOS, which uses GPS, Wi-Fi or cell-site information to define the location of the handset. If a device is able to connect to GNSS satellite constellations (such as the GPS), the information can be as accurate as 2 metres. Wi-Fi can be as accurate as 15 metres.

For all mobile devices, the mobile network operator will provide location information via the nearest cell tower to the caller. The accuracy of this information depends on whether the caller is in an urban, sub-urban or rural area and is in the range of several hundred metres to a few kilometres.

The system doesn't replace the need for emergency callers to state their address or location to the 111 operator but is intended to provide an additional way to help call takers verify the mobile phone caller’s location.

If you’re dialling 111 from an Android or iOS smartphone, your handset will automatically turn on location services when the 111 call is made. This allows the LAS system to receive your location data and pass it on to the emergency service provider. Location services on your phone will return to their previous state once the 111 call ends and the location data is sent.

(More information about this service, including the protection of privacy, can be found on the MBIE website here)

Another location option for the emergency services in New Zealand is a permissive mobile phone location app. This is sometimes used by Police Search and Rescue (SAR) if the lost person hasn't made a 111 call. The Police SAR Squad can send a text to a lost or overdue tramper (geocacher?) and when they click on the link in the text, the phone will send location information back to the Police SAR Squad.

But what if I didn't get lost in New Zealand?

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New Zealand's authorised emergency service providers (New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, St John and Wellington Free Ambulance) worked very closely together with MBIE and the Telecommunications industry to develop the ECLI system. This hasn't happened in other countries where there are numerous law enforcement jurisdictions etc. which makes it very difficult to implement such a system.

One option is to rely on a different location system where a lost person can provide information to an emergency call taker, who can then turn that information into a location to dispatch emergency services to. 

We do not promote this alternative system in New Zealand, as our ECLI and mobile locate systems provide our emergency services with a higher degree of certainty about a lost person's location.

The good news about this other location system is that I can use it to create a series of geocache puzzles...

...so if you can identify the system, you'll find the final location for this puzzle. 

The cache is a 200ml sistema container containing pencil & logbook.