Further progress on eCall standardisation

Creation date: 13 December 2006

The Mobile Standards Group of the European Telecommunication Standardisation Institute (ETSI-MSG) met on 2-3 November 2006. The European Commission gave a mandate to ETSI in 2005 to standardise the necessary eCall transport protocol by which the Minimum Set of Data (MSD) will be sent via the mobile telecommunication network (e.g. GSM) to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).

To ensure the functionality of eCall in the future, the transport mechanism for the MSD needs to be defined not only for GSM-, but also for UMTS-networks. This technical task was forwarded to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which brings together a number of telecommunications standards bodies.

The technical work to standardise the codec for an eCall in band transmission will be done in 3GPP’s SA WG4, which is setting up a "New Work Proposal - In Band transmission". 3GPP’s SA WG4 deals with the specifications for speech, audio, video, and multimedia codecs.

Additional eCall requirements were also discussed at the meeting, namely the residual error rates tolerable by the emergency centres and the necessity of having the MSD sent and acknowledged within 4-seconds. These requirements will in turn be communicated to the 3GPP SA WG4.

ETSI Chairman Francois Courau also informed participants that the UK and France have no objections against eCall 112 calls without a SIM card, provided that they can be discriminated from normal 112 calls. The standardisation of this discriminator in the GSM/UMTS specification must be done by the 3GPP.

The next ETSI MSG meeting will take place on 29-30 January 2007.