The first meeting of the Expert Group on Emergency Access set up under the European Commission?s Communications Committee (COCOM) was held on 16 February in Brussels.
The main goal of this group is to determine the requirements needed for communicating with emergency centres, especially when new technologies such as the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are used, and to develop a common emergency access interface that enables the respective centres to process the information that arrives via those new technologies. It also comprises the different valences associated to the operations in question and which encompass the part of electronic communications and the part of the organisations responding to the emergency.
This first meeting resulted in definition of the reference terms. A number of presentations were also given on some countries? solutions for responding to the need to ensure emergency services access for VoIP service users; the status of this matter?s standardisation in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) was also presented. Besides this, the European Commission proposed the end of 2006 as the target date for having a set of requirements to submit to the standardisation groups.
