*EMERGENCY*

Pauliedragon wrote: »

You can ring 112 from anywhere in the world it's the same as ringing 999 here.

Europe, not the world.

stoneill wrote: »

999 was chosen because it was the least likely to be dialed accidentally on rotary phones.

Well, it was one of the least likely to be dialled accidentally.

111 was considered, but it’s too easy to accidentally dial due to a wiring fault, work on the line or someone repeatedly tapping the hook. (This is used in NZ but as I mentioned they had inverted dials. So 111 is actually pulsed out as 000 elsewhere - 10 pulses).

CEPT, now ETSI, which standardises European telecommunication systems introduced 112 in 1972. It’s been planned in for that long, as has 00 for international calls and so on. Some countries, like Germany, adopted it much earlier than others. The EU ultimately mandated its use to make contacting emergency services more straight forward and it’s baked into the GSM/3GPP standards, which have their origin in ETSI.

999 is actually a bit problematic nowadays, as it’s one digit pressed repeatedly on a keypad, which is really easy to do by say sitting on a phone or a kid playing.

Increasingly, landlines are irrelevant and rotary dial is, at this stage, a museum piece. I wouldn’t even think a lot of younger people will have ever used a dial phone. I would doubt many would even know how. It’s only ever seen in old movies and is about as familiar as telegrams or non-decimal currency.

It’s extremely unlikely 999 will ever be removed as the cost of mapping it to 112 is minuscule. However, 112 is the code that will be advertised as it’s the most useful & works in far more places.

Remember one of the lads took my phone one day and called 999 saying I was stuck down a well and threw it back at me.

Was called back immediately by a ferocious Cork accent saying "We'll pick you up you little scumbag".

Felt bad for those seconds at the time (20 years ago).

That has stuck with me.

999 isn’t going away anytime soon, but 112 is the more useful code.

The main thing is you can get though to the emergency services early on one number in Ireland and always have been.

If you compare our setup with say France, there was a whole list of two digit emergency numbers.

112 works in France but it’s, for some reason, the most resistant to implementing a single emergency number:

Instead, you’ve this complicated list:

15: Ambulance (for other urgent medical call-outs)
17: Police / Gendarmes
18: Fire brigade & also sort of the main port of call for health related emergencies.
114: Deaf / Non verbal - for SMS or Fax
115: Emergency Shelter
119: Reporting child abuse
191: Air rescue (Plane accident/disappearance)
196: Sea and lake rescue
197: Terror attacks/kidnapping hotline

There were plenty of other countries that has multiple, separate numbers for emergency services too. So you can see why 112 was really important across Europe. If you’re travelling around, you need to be able to communicate in an emergency without having to dig out a telephone directory and look up local codes.

It was the same with things like the international access code being changed to 00. Before that, you had a different code in every country, which was why mobiles had to adopt that + symbol at the start of numbers. Countries adopted 00 bit by bit from the early 70s right through to the late 1990s.

There’s now a range of 116 number being rolled out for emergency supports such as the Samaritans and equivalents are now on 116 123 (free)

Ireland and the U.K. were amongst the first places to begin using those harmonised codes and they make a whole lot of sense.