Posted on: 19th December 2023, by Magrathea
We still have a few days to go before we can start festivities properly and time feels to be rushing by, is it really a year since I wrote something for last Christmas? So, it feels really important to just pause for a moment and take time to thank each of our wonderful clients, suppliers and industry colleagues for another brilliant year, and what a year it’s been.
Whilst Christmas is the traditional time of year to focus on others, when it comes to our clients we do this all year round. We have put in place many enhancements this year to ensure we remain easy to work with, provide a service our clients expect, along with future proofing our network for resilience and security, as well as staying current with all of the industry activity.
During the summer we carried out our first ever client survey. We had an amazing response and thanks to everyone who took the time to respond, it really helped to set our priorities for the remainder of the year and has led us to launch our new MAGIC Portal. It is still early days with many more features to be added, but thanks to our clients input we know we are on track to deliver the tools our clients want and need.
Over the year our team has grown, we have added an additional core network developer to the team as well as an extra person to our porting team to handle the ever-growing demand to bring numbers into our network. More recently we also added a dedicated business development specialist which marks the start of a more focused account management approach; something the client survey informed us we needed to get better at.
And of course, I must mention the important step we took in March when we welcomed our first non-executive director to the board. Simon Burckhardt brought us the experience and focus that we felt, after 21 years of trading, we could benefit from. Having a fresh pair of eyes at board level to challenge and encourage us has been wonderful and having Simon on the team, albeit part time, has been a wholly positive experience all round.
Our wonderful engineers and tech team have been building a new internal monitoring system, one that provides even faster and more efficient tools to support our commitment to a robust and reliable core network. This also ties in with the full review underway to ensure we meet our obligations under the Telecoms Security Review, a piece of work which will remain ongoing but is important for us to prioritise if we want to maintain our position within the carrier market.
We have crammed in a number of industry events, including speaking at Channel Live and helping to launch the CCUK Women in Telecoms group. There have been all the usual awards and dinners, some sponsored by us, and of course there have been many meetings with trade associations, parliamentary representatives and Ofcom.
We have implemented some key changes to CLI handling in line with new regulations coming out from Ofcom and Comreg and have migrated a few more key traffic types across to IP interconnects, leaving only a very small amount of traffic on the TDM network where it still makes economic and resiliency sense to do so.
Our team have been following the developments of One Touch Switching with avid interest, specifically getting involved in ‘Gaining Provider Led Business Steering Group’ in an effort to assist our clients meet their obligations in the future. Our work as part of the NICC on a possible common numbering database is also taking up some time but is an area we strongly feel will benefit all of us in the long run so we are determined to stick with it!
We’re all looking forward to what 2024 will hold for us but before we get there I hope you can also take a pause and reflect on what has been a very busy year for everyone in this industry. From the entire team here at Magrathea we would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful, healthy and Happy New Year.
Kind regards,
Tracey and the Magrathea team