Auditel Consultant:
Peter Harrison

Which Emergency number is best to use?

10 Mar 2010 | Filed under: Communications

Last night I went on a basic first aid course run by the St John Ambulance (something we should all really do, but I only finally got round to it due to our new baby) and the teacher gave us all a tip when calling Emergency Services. She strongly advised using 112 (the standard European Emergency Number) instead of 999 (UK local standard) when calling from a mobile. Her reasoning behind this advice was that 112 would allow the call to be routed via the nearest tower, regardless of whether or not that tower was on your home network i.e. it would allow roaming. But using 999 would only allow the call to be routed through your own mobile network. So if say you were on the Orange network, but only had Vodafone coverage at your location, calling 112 would get you through successfully while 999 would fail.

Now I don’t tend to believe everything I’m told, particularly regarding mobile phones! So I decided to research it a little further with my old friend Google. I found a lot of confusing and conflicting information, but this is what I concluded:-

1/ It would appear that contrary to many reports, until very recently, neither 999 or 112 would allow roaming away from your home UK mobile network. So there would be no advantage using 112, other than that it works in many parts of the World and especially across Europe. Interestingly, an emergency 999 roaming service was available back in the mid 90s but was switched off for various reasons!

2/ If you happened to have a non-UK sim in your phone, both 999 and 112 would allow roaming on UK networks.

3/ Ofcom sensibly changed things during 2009 and by the end of the year, roaming across all the UK networks was enabled for both 999 and 112.

So my conclusion is that it doesn’t really matter which emergency number you call. Both 999 and 112 numbers should get priority routing via any available UK network, regardless of the phone’s home network (although it’s unclear if that includes the ’3′ network at the moment). Good news for those planning to have an emergency in a rural area!