I don't know what rock they've been living under, but generally speaking putting requirements on companies appears to just mean that they agree and then don't do it.
Unless there is confidence that reneging on requirements would come with consequences this seems like a dead idea.
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3561535-its-time-to-r...
> Nearly half of the 80,000 calls received daily by BT operators in the UK do not involve requests for help.
I would never have estimated such a high quote of unnecessary emergency calls.
And that‘s a fun fact
> Experts chose 999 rather than 111 for technical reasons. In pre-optical fibre days telegraph wires rubbed together in the wind and transmitted the equivalent of a 111 call
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090302014433/http://www.btplc....
Touch-tone dialing makes all the emergency numbers O(1) instead of O(N).
Also in the olden days, call setup and tear-down could take quite a while. Digits to forward and relays to toggle. It could be easily half a minute before the other party started to ring, especially at peak times.
Edit: Corrected to 111 for New Zealand, as helpfully pointed out.
I’m really not sure what your comment stands to add, beyond useless whataboutism.
Rain happens. AM radio works everywhere. And a receiver is dirt cheap.
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops. Anyone that has used a SPOT or InReach satellite device knows it doesn't take much tree cover to make a satellite connection difficult or impossible. As just one example, there are plenty of places on Cougar Mountain near Issaquah, WA that have a dandy cell connection, but it would take minutes (possibly many) to get a satellite message sent. And that's using a low-bandwidth text message, not a voice call.
Also TFA: "Aviation and maritime people know this, which is why they use satellites." You know what you don't see a lot of when you're boating or flying a plane? Trees and cell towers. Perhaps there's another reason, El Reg.
"... giving Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and whoever that they include emergency universal comms on their satellite constellations to get permission to fly, and we're good. Emergency call services are very low bandwidth, which is very cheap, very power frugal, and very reliable to add to high bandwidth satellites and low cost devices on the ground. Because we're talking universal standards here, we can bake in solid location detection that we know will work. You can build the user bits into standalone devices or as part of a mobile phone, as long as it's a simple one-button activation."
... what gave me pause for concern was the thought that an otherwise obvious idea with a cheap and easy solution runs the risk of establishing Elon and Starlink into one of those "Too Big / Too Essential To Fail" types of corporation.
