Wi-Fi can enhance emergency services comms, says WBA

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) — the global industry body dedicated to driving the seamless and interoperable service experience of Wi-Fi across the global wireless ecosystem — has launched three reports providing a framework for how Wi-Fi, Passpoint and OpenRoaming can facilitate and sustain emergency calling and priority communications around the world.

Developed by WBA’s Mission Critical & Emergency Services Program, the framework demonstrates how across indoor venues, dense public spaces and other challenging environments, Wi-Fi further enhances the availability, reliability and performance of communications networks between the public, first responders, public safety organisations and emergency services.

Wi-Fi has already proved a critical line of communications in emergency situations, such as Hurricane Katrina when cell towers were affected. Equally, in densely populated public spaces and indoor environments, Wi-Fi can be a lifeline for communication between the public, emergency services and first responders, where other methods may be limited by signal strength, connection density and bandwidth.

The new papers provide a framework and practical advice to the emergency services, public safety organisations, mobile operators, device manufacturers and Wi-Fi providers. They explain how Wi-Fi extends traditional mobile services to enhance public safety responses, while also helping mobile operators manage the signal challenges of indoor spaces, densely populated public spaces and weak or dead spots.

Crucially, the papers also demonstrate how enhanced mission-critical communication services can be delivered for emergency services personnel, ensuring they are able to manage and coordinate responses through robust two-way communications in large operations such as disaster recovery and crowd control.

Collectively, the papers share a vision for the delivery of emergency communications that covers six areas:

• Wi-Fi as mission-critical infrastructure — Highlighting Wi-Fi’s evolution to a standards-compliant, resilient infrastructure capable of supporting emergency and public safety services.
• Emergency services access — Ensuring support for E-911/E-112 calls over Wi-Fi regardless of mobile subscription status.
• Priority access for NS/EP users — Wi-Fi allows real-time prioritisation of first responder traffic during network congestion.
• OpenRoaming and Passpoint integration — Enabling secure, seamless and policy-based access across federated Wi-Fi networks.
• Advanced location handling — Shared emphasis on accurate, standards-based location delivery using RFC 5580, IEEE 802.11mc round-trip time (RTT), and location configuration information (LCI) or emergency call routing to local PSAPs.
• Regulatory and legal readiness — Clear legal frameworks and alignment with 3GPP, IEEE, FCC and global emergency standards.

Emergency Calling over Wi-Fi Networks Industry Framework

This report defines an end-to-end framework for emergency calling over Wi-Fi, enabling users without cellular coverage or credentials to place calls, while ensuring secure, authenticated and location-aware communication through credential-free Wi-Fi access. The framework covers network discovery, secure connection to the network and location identification, and has been developed to ensure both operational and legal requirements around the world are met. Strategically, the report expands the availability of emergency services access to unconnected and Wi-Fi only users, calling on device manufacturers to embed emergency profiles into their devices.

Cellular Emergency Calling over OpenRoaming Wi-Fi Networks

As a mobile operator, understanding how to cost-effectively extend Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) to improve coverage in weak signal areas or dead spots is key to enabling emergency services communications. This report outlines how OpenRoaming can be used as a global extension of traditional mobile voice services, combining SIM-based authentication, emergency call routing and accurate location detection to deliver lower-cost roaming-friendly emergency Wi-Fi calling. It also demonstrates how OpenRoaming’s bronze performance tier supports VoWi-Fi with sufficient quality of service (QoS) to support emergency calling, as well as providing international emergency fallback when a cellular service is not available.

National Security & Emergency Preparedness (NS/EP)

For organisations and government agencies performing in NS/EP roles, reliable communications networks are critical to disaster recovery, crowd control and other emergency situations. Networks must be robust, prioritise emergency traffic, and be resilient in high-load scenarios. Increasingly, IoT devices have a crucial role to play in emergency situations. From access control to CCTV and critical national infrastructure control systems, uninterrupted connectivity must be maintained. This report shows the performance improvements, such as QoS in high-load scenarios, that Wi-Fi enables for government agency and emergency service users, validating its suitability for approval by policymakers and adoption by service providers for use in safety-critical sectors.

“Emergency communications must be seamless, secure and dependable — indoors, in dense public spaces and during crises,” said WBA CEO Tiago Rodrigues. “These reports show how Wi-Fi and OpenRoaming enhance cellular network emergency communications to deliver seamless resilient, standards-based services for the public, first responders and emergency services teams coordinating emergency responses.”

To learn more about the WBA’s Mission Critical & Emergency Services Program and download this set of reports, visit https://wballiance.com/mission-critical-emergency-program/.

Image credit: iStock.com/natatravel