WBA enhances emergency services Wi-Fi comms in challenging environments

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has launched three reports providing a framework for how Wi-Fi and other wireless communication standards can facilitate and sustain emergency calling and priority communications around the world.

WBA, a global industry body dedicated to driving the service experience of Wi-Fi across the global wireless ecosystem, says Wi-Fi has already proved a critical line of communications in emergency situations, such as Hurricane Katrina, when cell towers were affected.

Equally, it says, 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.

Developed by WBA’s Mission Critical & Emergency Services Program, the papers are designed to 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.

In addition, they aim to demonstrate 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.

Crucially the papers also seek to 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.

The papers share a vision for the delivery of emergency communications covering six areas: Wi-Fi as mission-critical infrastructure; emergency services access; priority access for NS/EP users; integration of the OpenRoaming and Passpoint standards; and advanced location handling.

In depth, it looks at how to ensure support for E-911/E-112 calls over Wi-Fi regardless of mobile subscription status and how Wi-Fi allows real-time prioritisation of first responder traffic during network congestion and how it enables secure, seamless, and policy-based access across federated Wi-Fi networks.

Specifically, the Emergency Calling Over Wi-Fi networks Industry Framework 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.

The Cellular Emergency Calling over OpenRoaming Wi-Fi Networks 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.

Commenting on the reports. Tiago Rodrigues, president and CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance, said: “Emergency communications must be seamless, secure and dependable—indoors, in dense public spaces and during crises. 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.”