EENA Warns of Hidden Risks to Emergency Calls During 4G and 5G Transition
The European Emergency Number Association has published new findings from the 2026 EENA Conference highlighting serious vulnerabilities in emergency communications as 2G and 3G networks are phased out across Europe and beyond.
The European Emergency Number Association (EENA) has published a detailed analysis of the risks facing emergency call services during the ongoing transition from legacy 2G and 3G networks to 4G and 5G, drawing on expert contributions presented at the 2026 EENA Conference. The organisation warns that the shutdown of older networks, combined with the complexity of IP-based replacements, is already creating measurable gaps in the reliability of 112 services and could leave significant numbers of citizens without dependable access to emergency communications if not properly managed.
EENA cites the November 2023 outage in Australia as a defining case study. A single network misconfiguration caused more than 2,000 emergency calls to fail during a twelve-hour disruption, despite mobile devices continuing to display a normal signal. In response, the Australian government established an independent testing programme through the Australian Control Test Facility, bringing together regulators, industry, telecom operators and academia. Testing revealed that emergency call set-up times, typically around eight seconds, could rise to several minutes under stressed or hidden-failure conditions, with performance varying significantly between device manufacturers.
According to EENA, the key lesson is that normal day-to-day reliability is not equivalent to crisis resilience. The association underlines that interoperability failures between legacy and IP-based systems, routing and configuration errors, missing or delayed caller location data and the absence of identifiers needed to enable emergency callbacks are now recurring concerns across multiple jurisdictions.
EENA also highlights Romania's experience as evidence that coordinated action can deliver measurable improvements. Following nationwide enablement of VoLTE and structured testing with mobile operators, location accuracy for 112 calls rose from 50 percent to 75 percent. The association points to early testing, cross-sector cooperation and continuous monitoring as essential conditions for a safe network transition.
The publication further addresses the systemic fragility of modern IP-based telecom networks, in which shared central functions for routing, naming and authentication can allow a single error to cascade into nationwide outages within minutes. EENA notes that human error accounts for approximately two-thirds of incidents, and that economic pressure, staff reductions and increasing reliance on technologies such as AI are placing additional strain on resilience.
The transition is equally consequential for eCall, the automated in-vehicle emergency call system mandated under EU law. EENA references the X_HeERO project, which is supporting the migration of Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) to Next Generation eCall over 4G and 5G, alongside standardisation work within CEN Technical Committee 278, Working Group 15. The association notes that many PSAPs and several Mobile Network Operators remain unprepared, and points to the Czech Republic's NG eCall deployment as an example of the extensive testing, fallback mechanisms and continuous simulation required for a successful migration.
EENA concludes that safeguarding emergency communications through the 4G and 5G transition will require shared responsibility across governments, network operators, device manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers and PSAPs, underpinned by repeatable resilience assessments and sustained collaboration across the wider critical communications ecosystem.
