Location Information Services

Emergency Caller Location Information Service

Globally, emergency services are increasingly benefitting from the precise, rapid location information cellular technology can provide to help locate people calling 111. These location information services have become a critical component of emergency response systems.

Previously housed in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Next Generation Critical Communications now delivers the Emergency Caller Location Information Service (ECLI) for New Zealand’s emergency services.

About the ECLI Service

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 Emergency Caller Location Information Service turns that data into information about your mobile device’s likely location.

Location information is provided to emergency service providers - New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Hato Hone St John and Wellington Free Ambulance - to assist in their response where a 111 emergency call has been made from a cellular device.

The ECLI Service saves lives by decreasing the time taken to verify location and reduce the average dispatch time to incidents, with controls in place to protect callers’ personal information.

Infographic showing how the Emergency Caller Location Information system works

Emergency Caller Location for Emergency Services (1.3 MB)

Benefits of the ECLI Service

Since its launch, the ECLI Service has delivered on the Government’s requirement to provide emergency service providers with the best available mobile caller location when a person dials 111 on their mobile phone.

The service has helped emergency service providers locate emergency callers in numerous situations, including vehicle accidents, house and rural fires, people lost while tramping, medical events, where a caller is unable to communicate with the call taker, or it is challenging to do so, which could be for multiple reasons.

Prior to the ECLI Service, where people couldn’t give an accurate address, emergency services experienced difficulty pinpointing a caller’s exact location and in some cases were required to make a special information request to a network provider for a caller’s location which took additional time. These requests have reduced as a result of the introduction of the ECLI Service.

Each year, there are more than 2 million calls to emergency services with 84 per cent of those being made from a mobile phone.

The ECLI Service supports 111 TXT

The ECLI Service also supports location data sent by a registered 111 TXT user, texting 111 on Android or iOS devices. The 111 TXT service(external link) is for people who are deaf, hearing- or speech-impaired.

Protecting your privacy

The ECLI Service is designed with controls to protect the privacy of mobile callers.

The Privacy Commissioner has authorised the Emergency Caller Location Information System via Schedule 4 of the Telecommunications Information Privacy Code(external link), which was updated in 2020.

The Code defines the boundaries and controls on the system’s use. Emergency Caller Location Information will only be collected and used to:

help emergency service providers identify the location of callers to 111 to assist with their response,

allow emergency service providers to maintain records of the information used to establish the location of an emergency and to help us monitor and audit the system.

Location data is only held to facilitate these two purposes, after which it is automatically deleted after six hours.

While location information is held within the ECLI Service, it is stored in secure datacentres and access is tightly restricted to use by people who use it for the purposes identified in Schedule 4 of the Telecommunications Information Privacy Code.

Who contributes to the ECLI Service?

The ECLI Service is a collaboration between:

NGCC

emergency service providers (New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Hato Hone St John and Wellington Free Ambulance)

mobile network operators (2degrees, Spark and One NZ).

Each agency has a role in the system:

we oversee the operation of the service which receives and processes Emergency Caller Location Information

the emergency service providers receive the location information and use it to verify a mobile caller’s location

the mobile network operators provide network cell-site data.

Accuracy of the ECLI Service

The level of location accuracy is dependent on the method used to perform the location position calculation. The ECLI Service currently supports the following location positioning methods:

Handset-based positioning

This is a standards-based location solution using handset-based location positioning on supported Android and iOS smartphones (via the mobile network operators).

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 location information can be as accurate as two metres. Wi-Fi location information can be as accurate as 15 metres.

Network-based positioning

For network-based locations, the accuracy of a location measurement is dependent on the supported capabilities of the mobile phone. Similar to handset-based positioning, the network-based method can also calculate a precise location if the mobile phone supports GNSS satellite (GPS) positioning. The network-based solution may also use less precise network positioning methods such as timings and power measurements and in some scenarios, where network measurements are not available, coarse location information such as cell site may be the only location information provided.

For all network-based location methods, the accuracy of this location information depends on whether the caller is in an urban, suburban or rural area.