Advanced Mobile Location


Advanced Mobile Location is an emergency location-based service available on smartphones that, when a caller dials the local short dial emergency telephone number, sends the best available geolocation of the caller to a dedicated end-point, usually a Public Safety Answering Point, making the location of the caller available to emergency call takers in real-time. AML improves the time taken by emergency call takers to verify the location of callers and can improve the time taken to dispatch an emergency response.
AML was standardised by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute Emergency Telecommunications Subcommittee in 2019 as Technical Specifications.

History

AML was developed in the United Kingdom by British Telecom, EE Limited, and HTC as a solution to problematic caller location in emergencies. When a person in distress calls the emergency services with a smart-phone where AML is enabled, the telephone automatically activates its location service to establish its position and sends this information to the emergency services via an SMS. The services uses either a global navigation satellite system or WiFi depending on which one is better at the given moment. It was estimated that this technique is up to 4000 times more accurate than the previously used system.

Implementations

announced in July 2016 that all Android phones running version 2.3.7, Gingerbread or later include AML. Google calls their implementation Emergency Location Service.
Apple devices running iOS 11.3 or later also support AML.
AML was deployed in: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Slovenia, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States. Australia planned to implement AML in 2020.
Several countries around Europe are testing AML with the aim of deploying it by 2020. The European Electronic Communications Code mandates that all EU states must implement AML by December 2020.
AML also works on Android phones in some countries when using their emergency SMS service. As of March 2021, all smartphones sold in the EU Single Market will have to be equipped with AML, following a delegated regulation supplementing the Radio Equipment Directive.

Functionality

AML automatically turns on Wi-Fi and location services on the handset, collects and computes location data, then sends an SMS to the emergency services containing the caller's location, before turning location services and Wi-Fi off again.
The service can also send the data via an HTTPS POST request to the specified endpoint. The country implementing AML decides whether to use an SMS endpoint or an HTTPS endpoint or both.