Prepaid Cell Phones and Emergency Service

Discover the fundamentals on prepaid cell phones and 911 services. Find what prepaid cell phone companies are requisite to do and why.

Every person is acquainted with 9-1-1 services, which allows you to easily contact emergency services from your home phone. But what about your cell phone? Emergencies can come about when you are absent from home. And even while you are at home, more households are moving towards a single-line solution, replacing their landline phones with cellular phone.

The FCC necessitates all cellular carriers to set through all 9-1-1 calls, even when the phone doesn’t have an active service contract. Persons who have medical conditions may perform well to carry an emergency cell phone, even if they don’t use a mobile phone on a regular basis. It is also a perfect solution for the aged, who may be at risk while out and about. Keeping an emergency mobile phone in the car's glove compartment, along with a moveable charger, can help prevent a disaster in case of a breakdown or accident in a remote area.

The alleged E911 (superior 911) service, mandated by the FCC, also needs carriers to implement a system that informs emergency dispatchers the location of the caller. This has been a part of landline emergency services for many years, and when you call 9-1-1 from your home phone, the dispatcher automatically recognizes your recall number and your permanent location. But on a cellular phone, there are a number of technological challenges. Luckily, the mobile phone companies stepped up to the plate and came up with a solution. In stage I of the FCC mandate, carriers had to make a system that would tell dispatchers the mobile phone number of the caller, with the location of the cell tower, which would give at least an approximate geographic location. More sophisticated location detection technology uses GPS-enabled mobile phones to decide the location of the caller in an urgent situation.

Stage II, scheduled to be completely implemented by the end of 2007, goes a step further by given that Automatic Location Identification (ALI), with exact latitude and longitude of the caller, to the emergency dispatcher. This capacity has been incorporated into lots of newer mobile phones, but there are still older mobile phones still in use. If you plan to use your mobile phone as an urgent situation backup, ensure you have a newer "location-sensitive" phone that is prepared to handle this service.

There is no rate for calling 9-1-1 from a mobile phone; the E911 substructure is paid for with a little surcharge on normal mobile phone services.