SOS Alarm Sverige AB is a Swedish

publicly owned company A state-owned enterprise (SOE) is a government entity which is established or nationalised by the ''national government'' or ''provincial government'' by an executive order or an act of legislation in order to earn profit for the government ...

that operates

emergency number Most public switched telephone networks have a single emergency telephone number (sometimes known as the universal emergency telephone number or the emergency services number) that allows a caller to contact local emergency services for assista ...

112 in Sweden. The enterprise is owned equally by the Government of Sweden and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions.

History

SOS Alarm has its origin in a state investigation regarding the rural telephone automation from 1944. There it was proposed that telephonists should remain at certain switchboard stations even if they were automated. The telephonists would then be able to connect subscribers to the doctor, police, fire brigade, and similar services. After several lengthy state investigations, it was decided in 1956 that the SOS service should be introduce. At this point of time ''"SOS"'' is an initialism of ''"Samhällets olycksfalls- och säkerhetstjänst"'' or ''"The community's accident and security service"''. Calling number 90 00 00 was chosen, which later was changed to 90 000. The number was chosen because it was easy to remember and unlikely to be dialed by mistake (as the numbers 0 and 9 were on opposite side of the

rotary dial A rotary dial is a component of a telephone or a telephone switchboard that implements a signaling technology in telecommunications known as pulse dialing. It is used when initiating a telephone call to transmit the destination telephone number ...

). Today the emergency number is 112. The first SOS central opened 1956 in Gothenburg. The year after, several others opened in

Jönköping Jönköping (, ) is a city in southern Sweden with 112,766 inhabitants (2022). Jönköping is situated on the southern shore of Sweden's second largest lake, Vättern, in the province of Småland. The city is the seat of Jönköping Munici ...

Uppsala Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inha ...

, and

Östersund Östersund (; sma, Staare) is an urban area (city) in Jämtland in the middle of Sweden. It is the seat of Östersund Municipality and the capital of Jämtland County. Östersund is located at the shores of Sweden's fifth-largest lake, Storsjön ...

. The capital Stockholm got their SOS central in 1958. At the start the SOS service was a referral service where the telephonist forwarded the person in need to respective emergency service according to various lists with on-call doctors and similar. With time the service expanded to also include fire brigades and ambulances. When the subscriber dialed "''90 000"'' on their phone, the number was converted in the

telephone exchange telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syste ...

s and the telephonist received the call as "''90 7XX"''. The two last digits represented the network junction the call came from, and thereby from which general area the call was made. In 1973 the responsibility for emergency calls was transferred to SOS Alarm, with the state, the ''Local Authorities Association (Kommunförbundet)'', and ''County Council Association (Landstingsförbundet)'' as owners. The company name at this time was SOSAB, but it was later changed to SOS Alamering AB, and then its current name SOS Alarm Sverige AB. The company was financed with appropriations up until December 1994 and became in 1995 a

for-profit company A for-profit corporation is an organization which aims to earn profit through its operations and is concerned with its own interests, unlike those of the public (non-profit corporation). Structure A for-profit corporation is usually an organization ...

. On June 1, 1996, the then-current emergency number 90 000 was replaced with the pan-European emergency number 112

90 000

90 000 was the phone number to the Swedish emergency service that started in 1953, and was operational until July 1, 1996. The number was chosen at a time when phones were large and had

s, and it was specially adapted for Sweden. Unlike most other countries the Swedish rotary dish was labeled 0 to 9, instead of 1 to 0, and the phone number was considered to be easy to remember and easy to dial in darkness. The caller did not have to consider the number of zeros dialed as a connection would be established imminently after the first four.

Pulse dialing

Another reason the number 90 000 was chosen was because the relative ease you could call it without a dial dish through the pulse dialing system. The system worked as follow; you lift the phone handset, push the hookswitch in the

pulse train A pulse wave or pulse train is a type of non-sinusoidal waveform that includes square waves (duty cycle of 50%) and similarly periodic but asymmetrical waves (duty cycles other than 50%). It is a term used in Analog synthesizer, synthesizer p ...

sequence 10-paus-1-paus-1-paus-1-paus-1. When the sequence have been signalized the switchboard will execute the finalizing parts of the connection. For the new number 112 corresponding sequence will be 2-paus-2-paus-3. An advantage with phone-number 90 000 was the low statistical plausibility that the number would be generated by mistake. The

statistical probability Frequentist probability or frequentism is an interpretation of probability; it defines an event's probability as the limit of its relative frequency in many trials (the long-run probability). Probabilities can be found (in principle) by a repea ...

for a loose connection, or other types of electrical fault, to achieve the number series 90 000 is very low compared to the number series 112. When the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English ...

telephone company

BT Group BT Group plc ( trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, bro ...

introduced 112 to the United Kingdom the number of erroneous calls caused by electrical faults to be 8 million per year, which after technical measures was lowered to 200 000 per year. In relation British BT received about 25 million emergency calls in year 2001.

Criticism

In 2011 criticism was directed towards SOS Alarm on the basis that the operator was considered to have misjudged callers emergency situations. In four cases had the persons in need had died as ambulances was sent too late or not at all. In one of these cases the operator was

indicted An indictment ( ) is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use the felonies concept often use that of ...

for

involuntary manslaughter Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th ...

, but was later freed in district court. In the judgment, however, the district court criticized that ambulance had not been sent on basis of the indications the patient had provided.

Organisation

During a normal year SOS Alarm handles 3.8 million calls and 975 000 health matters. During 2017 about one-third of the 3 million incoming calls concurrence non-emergency matters and about 100 000 were prank calls.

References