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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Not a lot has changed.

You call the regional center (the 911, or in our case, 112 responders), you negotiate a timeframe for your tests (so that there's enough operators there), you tell them the phone number (and other data) that will be used for testing (because the responders get the approximate location of the caller, and might still send someone to check after a call, even if the voice doesn't get through), and then call 911 (112 here) a bunch of times.

Also, emergency calls have to work even without a sim card inserted, or with a simcard but still locked (via sim pin), or with an unlocked sim but locked screen, so that had to be tested too.

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This was also a huge issue with BlackBerry 10. We kept getting bugs about 999 being dialed because of the way the screen recognition was... The phone would wake up in your pocket, dial 999 and you'd pocket dial EMS because it was allowed to be dialed from above the lock screen no matter what.

I've recently accidentally pocket dialled Emergency Services with a recent Nokia running latest Android.

Somehow I manage to swipe the screen up and press the relatively small 'Emergency' button, all without touching the phone. It's really weird.

I’ve accidentally dialed 911 via the side buttons on my iPhone (I put it into the drink holder in a chair, and it was just tight enough to depress the buttons) and at least twice via the buttons on my Watch (trying to swap out the watch bands). Oh, and once my Watch was wet, and it registered my slide motion in the wrong spot.

Admittedly this is roughly once every 2 years, but still I’m about at the point where I’d like to disable all automatic emergency services.

My Pixel 5 had an issue with its power button a few weeks back where it would self-press the button. (I believe some rain had gotten in somehow and was shorting the button).

This resulted in the phone doing various things, such as opening the camera (double press of power), trying to turn itself off, and, worse: activating the "I'm in danger mode" (5 power presses in succession) and counting down to calling 911.

I caught it and cancelled before it dialed, then turned off the phone. However, as you might guess, the phone turned itself back on!

Fortunately I was able to (with much aggravation and accidental swaps to the camera app), eventually get to settings and disable the feature.

You can turn much of them off - https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/if-youve-ever-called-91...

I had to do this because the kids discovered that if they held down power off and then slid the bar over a nice woman would talk to them and then a big truck would show up!

Thanks, apparently I did turn them off at some point. Doesn’t appear to be a way to disable the emergency slider on Watch or iPhone though, unfortunately.

I let the kids play with an old flip phone, figuring they couldn't get up to too much trouble since it had no service.

Came downstairs to hear them talking about calling 911 - when I picked up the phone there were four outgoing calls!

Fortunately the big truck did not show up, so I guess the operator was able to figure out that there was not actually an emergency (or maybe the phone was too old to communicate its location).

My experience sitting in on 112 dispatchers as part of my EMS training was different. Multiple times per shift a caller would just start the conversation with something like “This is no emergency, I'm an employee of Vodafone/T-Mobile/etc and have to test 112”. Only network operators calling this way though, no phone manufacturers.

Normally phone manufacturers certify that this works against an operator test suite on simulator hardware, I believe.

Cannot have FCC etc. uncertified phone connect to normal networks - that would be a mess.

Happens all the time with roaming and imported devices.

I’m not aware of any western provider saying “oh, that block of IMEIs aren’t allowed to connect to the network”.

Canadian government shadow-banned sales of a bunch of Xiaomi cell phones, but local providers have no issues authing them onto the network. Can’t say no to that juicy roaming revenue even if it means putting your network at risk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620359

US networks get cagey about certain phones. CDMA carriers were always restricive, but now that 2g and 3g are mostly shut down, they don't want to allow registration of LTE devices that don't do Voice over LTE with their network because it breaks the emergency service rules.

I don't think they'd block them from roaming if the device has a foreign network sim that's authorized to roam though. Of course, major US carriers basically don't allow their subscribers to roam to other major carriers.

Phone manufacturers probably do use simulators for most of their test calls, but also nearly every emergency dispatch center will have several cell towers in their service area and very few have phone manufacturers or phone test facilities.

I have a friend who used to work on cell towers and he'd need to do a test call after certain types of maintenance, and might visit a few towers a day to do that work. On the other hand, a particular phone model probably only needs one or two live test calls per firmware release, so there's probably a lot fewer of those calls overall, even if you're at a dispatch center that serves an area including people testing phones.

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