u/ommmyyyy

I was traveling abroad, and in the country I was visiting, the emergency number for police is 100. During a situation where I believed police intervention was necessary (large fight in the middle of the street), I tried calling 100 from my phone but the call would not connect.

Instead, I received an automated message in English (not even the local language) saying the number was unavailable. I did not run out of minutes and calls to other numbers worked.

What made the situation even stranger was that my friend, standing right next to me (keep in mind my warp line was roaming on the same network he has a native SIM card for) called 100 from their phone and reached a police officer immediately.

After the situation was resolved (everyone was okay), I explained the issue to the officer. He told me that problems like this are becoming somewhat common with phones using international roaming. According to him, roaming devices especially when using VoLTE (Voice over LTE) can sometimes fail to properly route calls to local emergency services.

He suggested I go into my phone settings and disable VoLTE. After turning it off, I tested the number again, and 100 worked immediately.

He also explained that if I wanted to keep VoLTE enabled, I should dial 112 instead. He said 112 is recognized by the network as an international emergency number, so the local carrier immediately flags and routes the call to the appropriate emergency service in this case, the same destination as 100. I tried 112 with his permission and with volte on and I was routed correctly this time.

According to his explanation, when a roaming SIM uses VoLTE, call and data handling may still be routed through the user’s home carrier rather than directly through the local carrier network, which can sometimes interfere with local emergency-number routing and I should bring this to my home carriers attention.

Thank you!

TLDR: Always call 112 if you’re having an emergency abroad regardless of what the “correct” number is. And shout out to that officer for giving me a good technical explanation because I was thinking that their dispatch center was having issues accepting calls from American numbers.