This complements the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS), which allows such calls to avoid congestion on landline networks.
On July 6, 2012, President Obama signed Executive Order 13618, which eliminated the NCS as a separate organization; it was merged into the Office of Emergency Communications (OEC), which had been created in 2007.
A ceremony to retire the colors of the NCS and to celebrate the legacy of the organization was held on August 30, 2012, in Arlington, Virginia.
Once authorized, a user simply needs to prepend calls the vertical service code of "*272" to receive priority consideration on the wireless network.
The WPS will not preempt calls in progress, so the user will have to wait for bandwidth to open.