Posted by
wetbenang
at
Thursday, June 14, 2007
WHEN YOU FACE DEATH, DIRECT ACCESS IS BEST
(Telekom Malaysia today clarifies a few things in the NST over its 999 number. Please see my additional text.)
From next year, only 999 will, again, be used as the common number for all emergency calls. This, says Internal Security, is “in line with efforts to coordinate all emergency calls made to the police, health and fire and rescue departments as well as other security agencies”, which currently use different numbers. The move is also made to “overcome the problem of ‘missed’ and crank calls, it says. And Telekom Malaysia has been tasked to handle the new system.
Under the current system, the 999 number is for police and ambulance, 991 for Civil Defence Department and 994 for Fire & Rescue. The latter two numbers were introduced in 1991, ironically to address the problem of missed and unanswered 999 calls back then.
I guess a single number is a good idea, as there would be less confusion on the part of the public over which number to call during emergency situations. What’s not such a good idea, in my humble (and maybe ill-informed) opinion, is to let Telekom Malaysia operate the number, when the police has been requesting that all distress calls be directly routed to its command centres to reduce the time it would take to respond to emergencies.
According to NST, the police have contended for years that emergency response times could be drastically reduced if 999 calls are patched through directly to its dispatchers. The police also believe that emergency response times would continue to be slow while Telekom Malaysia operators take emergency calls because 999 is a "hunting" line. At present, emergency calls are handled by the same operators who usually handle enquiries on telephone number listings. (Telekom Malaysia says 999 is not a hunting line, and calls to this line are not put on queue. The calls are also handled by emergency service centre staff, and not the operators who also handle regualr enquiries).
This means a call put through from Kuala Lumpur to 999 could be picked up by an operator in Kuala Terengganu or Kuching if the operators in the city are busy, for example. Delays arise when operators unfamiliar with streets and addresses in the city spend valuable seconds or minutes determining the exact location of a caller who may well be facing a life and death situation. (Telekom Malaysia says it takes six seconds to verify emergency calls, and another 10 seconds to hand over the call to the relevant parties such as the police or ambulance.)
The Telekom operator would also have to spend time locating the correct police station or command centre to relay the information. Such delays appear to have driven the police to set up their own hotline service, Rakan Cop, in 2004. The service has helped speed up police response times tremendously. But this could be even quicker if 999 calls are patched through directly to police command centres, according to NST’s sources. (See above paragraph).
According to NST also, Telekom Malaysia refuses to hand over control of the 999 number to police unless it is paid between RM500 million and RM1 billion for its user database, to which the police need access to facilitate faster response time.(Telekom Malaysia denies ever asking for money for its subscriber database. It says 999 is a free service as part of its social obligation, and caller information is given free on a call-to-call basis)
Like millions of other Malaysians, I am extremely anxious over this. When you are faced with a life and death emergency situation, you’d want to receive assistance within the fastest possible time. In my opinion, unless Telekom Malaysia has something brilliant up its sleeve to improve the current situation, it would be best to leave the handling of 999 calls directly in the hands of the police.
(Telekom Malaysia says it has been working with the police for the past 30 years, and from its experience, only one per cent of the more than 40,000 emergency calls it receives daily are genuine. The rest are crank calls. Telekom says it sees its role as a filter service provider to ensure only genuine calls get to the police or other emergency response bodies.)
But then, what do I know?
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Wetbenang
reading this entry makes me wonder if I'm actually reading a blog or a journalist column in a daily.. :) hehe.. Anyway.. I agree that 999 should be passed to the police for efficiency reason. We should learn from the USA the way they actually operate that 911. And Telekom, for God's sake, just stop making profit from people's trouble.. arrghh.. What an annoyance, right, Che Man??
Xis said...
4:56 PM
What???? Let the police handle the calls directly?
And deprive Telekom from charging the Govt/police for handling the calls????
Surely, surely you wouldn't want that, bro! hehehehe....
you don't reckon these "services" are free, do you?!!!
Crabby Ashburn (Temasek-born Malaysian) said...
11:02 AM
Glad they finally made up their mind and standardized the system :)
savante said...
9:59 PM