Voice Service providers need to consider how they provide their Subscribers with access to the Emergency services via the ECAS.

This can be facilitated via either direct interconnection or by routing their calls via another service provider (i.e. Transit) with which they have the appropriate interconnection and transit agreement in place for Emergency calls. Service providers may also wish to consider a combination of these two methods which would provide greater redundancy and alternatives for routing emergency calls to the ECAS in the event of a failure.

Direct Interconnection

The ECAS can facilitate direct interconnection from service providers using SIP interconnection at its 2 Data centres. Service providers should provide resilient IP connectivity to both ECAS data centres and the ECAS team will work with the Service provider to provision the SIP interconnects.

The ECAS can facilitate limited colocation of service provider network termination equipment in its data centres for the purposes of interconnection subject to agreement between the Service provider and the ECAS.

Use of a Transit operator

Service providers may choose to use the services of another service provider with which it has an appropriate agreement and interconnection in place for the routing of Emergency calls to the ECAS. Emergency call transit services are known to be available from both Eir and BT Ireland however these services are outside of the responsibility of the ECAS. It should be noted that the use of a Transit service may also involve a transit fee being levied by the transit operator in addition to the ECAS Call handling fee (CHF – Link to Billing) which would be passed by the transit operator to the originating service provider.

Interconnection Agreements

To provide legal and regulatory certainty BT will be entering into contracts with the Providers supplying 112/999 calls or location information to ECAS and these contracts will be known as the Reference Interconnect Offer (“RIO”) for Providers directly interconnecting to the BT ECAS, and the Location Information Interconnect Offer (“LIRO”) for Providers not directly interconnected, but using the BT ECAS to fulfil the 999 obligations in their Authorisation to operate. The RIO incorporates the LIRO.