2027 Agenda

For six weeks in 2026, communities across North America became hometowns to the world. As international visitors arrived for the FIFA World Cup, North Texas 911 leaders began asking a simple question: What happens when someone with an international phone, speaking another language, needs to call 911?

Preparing for the world's largest sporting event exposed assumptions embedded in emergency communications systems designed primarily around North American callers, carriers, numbering plans, and languages. FIFA didn't create these challenges. It gave us a reason to go looking for them. International students, tourists, business travelers, and visitors are already calling 911 in communities every day. Attendees will leave with practical lessons from North Texas and questions every ECC should be asking now - before the world calls them.

This fast-paced case study shares what North Texas discovered through preparation, testing, and coordination before and during FIFA World Cup 2026. Attendees will explore challenges involving translation and transcription, international roaming, calling international numbers back from the ECC, and limitations created by traditional 10-digit callback fields, including a carrier solution developed to provide telecommunicators with critical callback information. But technology was only part of the lesson. Preparing for global callers also required new training, procedures, partnerships, and conversations about situations telecommunicators may rarely encounter.