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Apr. 7, 2009

Qualcomm is supporting the Third Generation Partnership Project’s (3GPP’s) recent approval of the European eCall in-band modem specification as it concerns the European Union’s eCall road safety initiative.

In Europe, the eCall public road safety initiative is designed to provide rapid assistance to stranded motorists or to people involved in a collision by automatically generating an emergency voice call via the mobile network to local emergency agencies, as well as sending out GPS information.

Scheduled for introduction and operation across Europe in late 2010, eCall is expected to help save lives by vastly improving notification of road incidents and greatly speeding up emergency service response.

Andrew Gilbert, executive v.p. of Qualcomm said “eCall has been a labor of pride for all its industry contributors, including Qualcomm’s engineering teams in Germany and San Diego. The completion of this emergency standard enables the auto industry and the public safety sector to move forward with plans to deploy the eCall system."

He added "we congratulate the 3GPP, ETSI and EU on successfully making the eCall initiative a reality."

The 3GPP standardization group has approved the final specs of the eCall standard. The specification work was undertaken by 3GPP at the request of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the European Commission, which sought a standardized technical solution to support the deployment of eCall all across Europe.

With the completion of this work, ETSI has adopted the 3GPP specifications and will publish them as ETSI standards.

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Source: The 3GPP.