Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
Emergency calling works in some countries and not others, and it stops working entirely when the power or internet does.
Where it works
Emergency calls from your phone system reach the emergency services in these countries:
- The Netherlands
- Belgium
- France
- The United Kingdom
- Canada
- Puerto Rico
- Poland
Anywhere else, an emergency call from this system cannot be relied on to connect.
An emergency call always takes priority
Within those countries, a call to a national emergency number goes through regardless of the state of the account. Restrictions on which numbers may be dialled do not apply to it, call limits do not apply to it, and it works on an account that has been disabled.
That is deliberate. Nothing administrative should stand between someone and the emergency services.
What stops it
A cloud phone needs power and a connection. In a power cut, an internet outage or a service interruption there is no emergency calling, and no warning that it has gone.
Any mobile phone can reach the emergency services, including one with no subscription at all. That is the fallback, and it is worth saying out loud to your staff rather than assuming they know.
Where a country is not supported
Two things are worth doing. Where you have physical phones in such a location, put a label on them saying emergency calls do not work from that handset. And consider a local gateway that connects a landline into the system, which puts the emergency route back.
The label matters more than it sounds. Somebody in an emergency reaches for the nearest phone, and that is not the moment to discover the limitation.
If you do have to call
Be ready to say where you are and what number you are calling from. The operator may not have either, because a cloud phone carries no fixed location the way a landline does.
Stay on the line until the operator ends the call.
Tell us when you move
The address held for emergency calls is the one we were given. A new office, an extra floor or a second site changes where help would be sent, and nothing updates that by itself.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.