The Operational Communication Center 112 (OKC 112) developed the system itself, which allows them to determine the location from which a call for help was made in less than half a minute, because mobile operators operating in Montenegro have never met the requirements prescribed by the regulations on this type of service.
This was told to "Vijesti" by OKC 112 of the Directorate for Protection and Rescue of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP). They added that mobile operators did not even financially support the establishment of this system.
"Vijesti" recently published information about emergency service numbers in Montenegro, stating that several of them are available to citizens, but that only for 112, the single European emergency number, is there a possibility to quickly and easily determine the location from which the call was made.
The Ministry of Interior's OKC for the number 112 for iPhone (iOS) and mobile phones running on the Android operating system uses advanced location technology, Advanced Mobile Location (AML), which is also used by countries in the European Union (EU).
As the OKC Directorate for Protection and Rescue of the Ministry of the Interior told "Vijesti", they introduced the AML technology themselves, after mobile operators failed to meet the requirements prescribed by the Regulation on the Single European Number 112.
This Regulation was adopted in 2014, at a time when the then Ministry of Information Society and Telecommunications was in charge of Vujica Lazović.
"The Regulation on the Single European Emergency Number 112 required mobile phone operators to, through three phases, and no later than 24 months from the date of entry into force of the Regulation, deliver location data according to the criterion that the area of the circle that determines the location of the caller is within a circle with a radius of 150 meters for urban and suburban areas and 300 meters for other areas, in 95 percent of outgoing calls or SMS messages, and the location of the caller must be determinable during that period and the data about that location must be delivered to OKC 112 within a period shorter than 30 seconds from the moment the call is established or the SMS is received," explains OKC 112 of the Ministry of Interior Directorate.
The stated conditions, they add, "were never implemented or met."
"In other words, mobile phone operators have never met the stated requirements," they stated in their response to "Vijesti".
The Directorate, they added, then launched an initiative in 2018 to introduce automatic mobile location tracking:
"In order to meet the requirements of the European Union, fulfill their Directives as well as the requirements of the European Emergency Numbers Agency (EENA), the Directorate for Protection and Rescue launched an initiative in 2018 to introduce AML (automatic mobile location), requesting through the Agency for Electronic Communications and Postal Services (EKIP), that mobile telephony operators, given that they did not meet the requirements for caller location, participate, as socially responsible companies, in co-financing the establishment of the aforementioned service. Unfortunately, the operators did not express the desire or will to support and fulfill their obligations in this way," the Directorate said.
They add that, in order to meet the required conditions and requirements of the EU, the Directorate for Protection and Rescue has, on its own initiative, embarked on a project to establish an AML service.
"Thanks to the contract signed by the Ministry of Interior with Google, it was launched in 2021 for Android devices, and a year later for iPhone devices. This means locating the caller within a radius of 50 meters, which is very important in cases where we have accidents and tourists getting lost in the mountains, but also in other emergencies. The location provided to us by mobile phone operators for older phone models is still very imprecise and implies a circle with a diameter of 1.000 meters or more," said OKC 112 of the Directorate for Protection and Rescue.
According to EKIP's work reports, operators began submitting location data in 2016.
In addition to the number 112, which is the single European emergency number, citizens in Montenegro, in the event of events requiring an urgent response from the authorities, also have national numbers available - for the police it is 122, for the protection and rescue service 123, 124 is the number where citizens can call for emergency assistance, while for assistance at sea, 129 is the number.
In 2013, as stated in the EKIP reports, the Ministry of Interior, during its mandate Raško Konjevića, formed a working group with the task of reviewing the possibilities of unifying the centers that use the numbers 112, 122, 123, 124 and 129 within the single OKC 112.
Former Commander of the Protection Service of the Capital City of Podgorica, Goran Janković, a few days ago he told "Vijesti" that during his mandate, the service requested that they be allowed to locate the people they were calling, but "that the Directorate was not willing to share the system with the Podgorica service."
The Directorate told "Vijesti" yesterday that they could not consider the comment "correct and well-intentioned".
"Because it simply does not work. We would like to remind you that there was an idea of unifying all emergency service numbers under a single European number 112, which was also expressed in 2013 by the Working Group formed by the Ministry of the Interior, whose member was a representative of the aforementioned service. This would significantly reduce the resources needed, speed up and significantly shorten the time of operation of all services, but this scenario has not come to fruition in practice. Accordingly, all calls that come to the number 112 and are from the scope of protection and rescue services are automatically forwarded to the aforementioned services with all relevant data, which also includes the location of the caller. This is the only possible way of functioning at the moment," the Directorate said, adding that the possibility of each service having the location of the caller would require large financial resources for each service separately.
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