Firefighters to Get Priority Mobile Network Access During Disasters

[Anchor]

In disaster situations, mobile phones often become unusable due to damaged base stations or network congestion. Starting today, June 10, firefighters will be granted priority access to mobile networks.

Park Jae-hyun has the details.

[Reporter]

Last year’s wildfire in the Gyeongbuk region caused the largest damage in history, covering an area equivalent to 63,000 soccer fields.

With approximately 2,900 base stations destroyed by the fire, massive communication disruptions occurred.

Mobile phones for both residents and firefighters stopped working.

[Firefighter deployed at the time: I remember that communication was very poor on the evening the fire spread. Phones need to have a signal. There are times when walkie-talkies don't work...]

When communication traffic spikes suddenly during large rallies or concerts, connection failures can hinder immediate responses to accidents.

In such situations, a service that prioritizes voice calls and internet connections for firefighters has officially launched today.

The system works by installing dedicated SIM cards in firefighters' work phones, allowing their signals to be transmitted with priority.

This marks the first exception to the "network neutrality" principle—which dictates that all data traffic must be treated equally—since its introduction 15 years ago.

How does it work?

This is a small base station built in a controlled environment.

We will demonstrate how a firefighter's phone operates in a situation where communication is difficult.

In a base station that can connect two mobile phones, with two devices already connected, we attempted to connect a regular phone and a firefighter's phone simultaneously.

Unlike the regular phone, the firefighter's phone connects without issue.

It is also granted priority in data transmission, achieving speeds nearly twice as fast as the regular phone.

Because it utilizes reserved bandwidth, the two devices already connected remain unaffected.

[Lee Myeong-seop, Team Leader of CSR Innovation, LG Uplus Communication Center: (At disaster sites) firefighters have often told us about the difficulties they face regarding communication while looking at our vehicles. We wanted to resolve these difficulties on the front lines...]

The three major mobile carriers plan to replace the SIM cards in approximately 16,000 devices, including work phones and tablets used by firefighters nationwide, within the next two months at the latest.

Reported by Park Jae-hyun | Video by Kim Nam-sung | Video Editing by Jeon Min-gyu | Graphics by Lee So-jung
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.