Advanced Mobile Location

What is Advanced Mobile Location?

Advanced Mobile Location (AML) is a solution provided by telecommunications allowing companies to identify your exact location by using location-based data from your mobile device.

In the case of an emergency call, an AML-enabled smartphone immediately transmits the caller’s accurate location to emergency responders. This information is acquired from the phone’s location data.

Advanced Mobile Location is not an application; it is a system for sending data from a smartphone to an emergency call center through SMS or HTTPS, and it’s free. It is available to emergency responders throughout the country that have deployed AML.

A brief history of the Advanced Mobile Location

Advanced Mobile Location was developed by John Medland, a former BT 999 Policy Manager, who began a pilot project in 2014. 

The European Emergency Number Association (EENA), a non-governmental organization in Europe, immediately offered John its assistance in ensuring that similar successful initiatives could be replicated throughout Europe and the world. 

Since then, EENA has been collaborating with public safety authorities, mobile carriers, and smartphone operating system suppliers to promote standardization and deployments of Advanced Mobile Location.

How Advanced Mobile Location works

When a caller dials the national emergency number (depending on the country), cell phones with AML technology can provide more exact location details. AML offers emergency assistance to pinpoint your position to roughly a five-meter radius if you’re calling from outside, or within 25 meters if you’re calling from inside a building.

AML is integrated into smartphones and is generated only when you dial an emergency hotline such as the UK’s 999 or Australia’s Triple Zero. It deactivates as soon as the call is ended. Depending on what is available, your position is determined using a combination of GPS signal, Wi-Fi, mobile network, and other sensor inputs. 

While you’re on the phone with responders, this calculation takes place completely in the background. It generally takes 25 seconds or less to compute the location of the calling device, at which point your smartphone immediately sends an SMS with the accurate location information to emergency services.

Your phone does not keep a record of the SMS; therefore, you will not see it in your sent messages. When you contact emergency services, you will still be asked to provide exact details of your location verbally. 

Callers must offer as many details as possible to the operator, since they may require information that cannot be acquired through technology.