Apple has officially announced that it has expanded the coverage of its emergency SOS service via satellite, introducing it in a first tranche of European countries. The bad news is that it is not yet Italy’s turnas currently the affected countries are France, Germany, UK and Ireland. The service is quite recent, in fact it was launched last month in the United States and Canada, with the promise of expanding the list of supported countries in the short term.

For those who don’t know, this technology allows users to use emergency services for messages outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage. The service also allows you to reassure friends and family by sharing your location via satellite. Functionality is available to all users with an ‌iPhone 14‌ model updated to iOS 16.1 and it’s free for two years.

But that’s not all, as Apple says that after the release of iOS 16.2 (should arrive shortly) users who dial a local emergency number will automatically be directed to 112, the European emergency number. To reduce transmission times as much as possible, Apple has also created an ad hoc algorithm for compressing messages that makes them three times smaller and even the iPhone shows how to best direct it to simplify operations.

“Being able to use a satellite connection to dial 999 or 112 if there’s no cellular or Wi-Fi coverage is a breakthrough that Apple brought to the general public with the iPhone 14,” said John Anthony, of the British Association of Public Safety Communications.

At this point we just have to wait for further expansion, since a similar service could be a great help in all situations of danger and absence of signal, and recent natural events remind us more and more often that it is impossible to predict every phenomenon.

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