With 333 public emergency call buttons, the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol (Agency for Civil Protection) is establishing a comprehensive, independent emergency communication system for 540,000 residents. The solution provided by technology supplier Swissphone combines robust hardware, an energy-efficient mioty-based radio network, and a fully redundant infrastructure. This creates a fallback layer that had previously been missing in crisis and outage scenarios.
The challenge: Reliable emergency alerting even in the event of network failure
South Tyrol is characterized by alpine regions with high mountains, narrow gorges, and therefore areas where mobile dead zones occur repeatedly. Natural events such as heavy snowfall or storms can also affect infrastructure, temporarily restricting communication. That power and mobile network outages can occur even in Europe is illustrated by incidents such as the large-scale outages in Spain and Portugal, as well as in the Swiss canton of Valais in April 2025. If the internet or even the power supply fails in an emergency, the population is left without a reliable means of alerting them.
The Autonomous Province of South Tyrol therefore set itself the task of creating a resilient emergency infrastructure. It was to operate independently of public networks, achieve long ranges in mountainous terrain, and at the same time be energy-efficient enough to run on emergency power over an extended period. Conventional mobile solutions were ruled out due to their high energy consumption; other LPWAN technologies also did not offer the required robustness and fail-safety for critical infrastructure.
In addition, the solution was to be seamlessly integrated into the existing paging system of the Province of South Tyrol—a system that had previously only enabled alerting from the control center to emergency responders, but provided no return channel from the population.
The solution: Resilient mioty network
Swissphone, one of Europe’s leading providers of solutions in the fields of alerting and critical incident management, has developed a multi-layer, fully redundant concept for the Province of South Tyrol: a regional mioty network with high resilience, along with the new public emergency call button m.HELP.
The mioty alliance, of which Swissphone is a member, is a non-profit organization that promotes scalable and efficient massive IoT connectivity. mioty technology is an ETSI-standardized LPWAN protocol based on the TS-UNB method (Telegram Splitting Ultra Narrowband), a radio protocol optimized for low power consumption.
To cover the entire Province of South Tyrol—with nearly 540,000 residents across an area of 7,400 km²—only 50 mioty base stations (m.BASE) are required. By November 2025, around half of them had already been installed. The sites are located at elevated positions such as ridgelines or towers with emergency power supply. mioty technology is characterized by long range, robust signal transmission, and extremely low energy consumption. The low power requirement in particular is crucial for battery-operated end devices and for reliable communication even under adverse conditions. Many emergency call buttons can reach multiple base stations simultaneously, creating natural redundancy.
333 public emergency call buttons integrated into the existing infrastructure
A total of 333 m.HELP emergency call buttons are being installed at fire stations in the municipalities of South Tyrol. They feature a rugged IP65 enclosure (dust-tight and protected against water jets), a status LED, and a loudspeaker that outputs different predefined voice messages depending on the situation. The devices are mains-powered and additionally equipped with a buffer battery that bridges power outages of up to 48 hours. The core component of the m.HELP emergency call button is the mioty module m.YON, which is used for wireless data transmission to the nearest base station.
The data from the base stations is aggregated in a locally installed, redundantly designed service and application center. The infrastructure is deliberately not cloud-based in order to ensure independence from the public internet. If one server fails, the second takes over without interruption. Via existing alarm servers, emergency calls are transmitted directly to the volunteer fire brigade in the respective region.
The result: Best practice for critical infrastructure
With Swissphone’s new mioty-based solution, South Tyrol is establishing an infrastructure that will continue to function in an emergency even if mobile networks, the internet, or parts of the power supply fail. The combination of mioty radio technology, a redundant backend architecture, and robust emergency call buttons creates a highly available and autonomous fallback layer for emergency situations.
Implementation of the overall system is expected to be completed in the first half of 2026, enabling commissioning in the summer of the same year. South Tyrol will thus become a pilot project with lighthouse character, demonstrating how modern IoT technologies such as mioty can improve critical infrastructure in public spaces and make it more resilient. For the Agency for Civil Protection, a successful rollout will result in a scalable model that could be easily transferred to other regions.
For the population, the solution means greater safety, a reliable way to call for help, and shorter response times in an emergency. After an alarm is triggered via m.HELP, only a few minutes are expected to pass before first responders arrive on site.
