Qualcomm announced its support for the eCall public safety initiative. eCall is a European Commission project designed to improve transportation safety by providing rapid assistance to motorists involved in a collision anywhere in the European Union.

collision activates on-vehicle sensors causing an emergency voice call (E112) to be established via the cellular network to local emergency agencies via the Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP). In addition to enabling two-way speech communication between the motorist and the PSAP operator, eCall employs an in-band voice-channel modem to transmit position location, airbag deployment, Vehicle Identification Number and other relevant information over the cellular network to the PSAP operator. The in-band voice-channel modem enables use of existing cellular networks to support quick deployment of an end-to-end eCall solution in vehicles and PSAPs.

An engineering team in Qualcomm Germany has been leading the system development for an in-band voice-channel modem eCall solution that meets the European Commission’s requirements.

“Qualcomm fully supports the important eCall public safety project,” said Andrew Gilbert, executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm Internet Services, MediaFLO Technologies and Qualcomm Europe. “Based upon our extensive experience with modems and speech codecs, we realized that we had the technology and understanding to develop a technical solution meeting the eCall requirements.”

To accelerate the deployment of the eCall solution, Qualcomm will not charge royalties on sales of eCall in-band voice-channel modem equipment located in the PSAP or core network that incorporate Qualcomm patents. Qualcomm’s licensing policy with respect to eCall solutions that are included in WCDMA subscriber devices will be consistent with Qualcomm’s standard patent licensing policy, which does not increase Qualcomm’s standard WCDMA royalty rate for additional Qualcomm patented technical functionality that is included in a dual-mode handset.