None. Any app that can lookup your words can show you the coords.
The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone.
I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.
> The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone.
I mean.. as opposed to two numbers? A slow speed high error correction audio encoding of them would be easy. Call emergency services, press the button, they decode the tones, immediate, accurate, simple.
If you mixed the calling and playback into a single action, you could make calls and direct people without even the ability to speak.
Well yeah, I'm not convinced either, but I also don't deal with panic ridden callers to emergency phone lines. I think I've called emergency 3 times in my many years.
Maybe it helps with an issue they have noticed with certain callers that I'm not aware of.
At least wiki brightened my mood : The site has been parodied by others who have created services including What3Emojis[29] using emojis, What3Birds[30] using British birds, What3fucks[31] using swear words and What3Numbers[32] using OpenStreetMap tile identifiers.
There's two scenarios here. Either you're looking up an exact location (either w3w or ll) as the information is required and then communicating it to others, or you're doing that in advance for an area you're familiar with and then memorising it.
In situation A, it's going to be a lot quicker and clearer to communicate w3w than an ll pair (for the same precision a ll pair requires 12-18 digits, plus specificity on +/-).
In situation B it's going to be a lot easier to remember the w3w descriptor, and you still have the same advantage as in situation A.
For spoken communication, w3w's rival is "it's 123 Fake Street, I'm the bloke in the green parka", not ll pairs.
None. Lat longs usability isn't the best (people don't like long numbers). But it's failure mode won't send you to Vietnam when you meant a public park in the UK. even if this system is constrained with simple, short, not confusable words (which would entail shrinking the earth or lowering the resolution) the fact that addresses are randomly assigned extremely reduces it's utility. Can you look at 2 addresses and know immediately where they are in relation to each other? Not the best tool for most map problems.
Getting sent 1km or even 100m away by accident could be critical depending on the geography. The closeness of the numbers increases that possibility. And an error that reports Vietnam is easy to coorrect.
The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone.
I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.