Ready for tomorrow’s emergency call system: CreaLog at the NG eCall Plugtests™ 2025

Consider the following scenario: a vehicle leaves the road and collides with an obstacle. By default, this automatically deploys the vehicle’s airbags, and the In-Vehicle System (IVS) likewise sends a 112 emergency call to an emergency and service control center automatically, or at the push of a button if needed. This transmits not only the vehicle’s GPS location but also its direction of travel, the number of passengers, and various types of vehicle sensor data, making it as easy as possible for police, fire services, and emergency responders to pinpoint the exact accident location and reach the scene quickly.

This process is known as eCall . Since 2018, the European Union has legally required vehicle manufacturers to equip vehicles with IVS that support eCall. However, mobile networks have advanced considerably since eCall’s introduction in 2018, and 3G is already being phased out step by step in other parts of Europe. That’s why the Next Generation Emergency Call (NG eCall) ensures that vehicle emergency calls can continue to be made over 4G/LTE and 5G using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology going forward. Specifically, from January 1, 2026, all new vehicle types on Europe’s roads – as well as all European emergency call control centers – must support NG eCall.

Ensuring the interoperability of all components

To ensure that all components required for NG eCall – from vehicle and network components to control centers – function reliably and interoperably, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), in cooperation with the European Emergency Number Association (EENA), held the “Next Generation eCall Plugtests ™ 2025” from June 10 to 13. At this event, hosted in Bonn by Deutsche Telekom, more than 100 participants – ranging from automotive manufacturers and suppliers to emergency equipment suppliers and system component vendors – carried out interoperability tests between IVS and control center systems.

The tests followed the ETSI TS 103 683 specification for Next Generation eCall High Level Application Protocol (HLAP) Interoperability Testing and were carried out in a real, commercial, public mobile and fixed-line network environment provided by Deutsche Telekom for this purpose. Scenarios tested included, for example, a change in emergency location and direct communication between the control center and an IVS at the accident scene.

Together with Intersys, we took part in the tests and demonstrated NG112-based routing of NG eCalls. NG112 is a modern, flexible, and future-proof architecture for emergency calls in Europe, based on IP technology and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and specified by ETSI. In Switzerland, for example, our customer Swisscom already relies on NG112 for reliable emergency call routing in its network, using CreaLog’s Emergency Service Routing Proxy (ESRP) and E-Call Modem together with Intersys’s Location Information Server (LIS).

“The event at Deutsche Telekom sent a strong signal for effective, cooperative collaboration among different manufacturers to improve emergency calls in Germany” , says Johannes Beck, Presales and Product Manager at CreaLog.

You can find more information about our emergency call solutions here .

The test report for the “Next Generation eCall Plugtests ™ 2025”, published by ETSI, is now available. Read the report