Posted on: 17th April 2023, by Magrathea
Welcome to the latest edition of the Magrathea Newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
Gaining Party Led Switching & Porting
We have touched on this a few times now but it’s worth repeating as the deadline for implementation has now passed and, fully aware that ‘One Touch Switch’ is not ready for residential switching, Ofcom have commenced an enforcement programme to ensure that industry are taking this seriously and are pushing to get the service in place as soon as possible, visit here for details.
The One Touch Switching Company Ltd (TOTSCo) have been engaging regularly with stakeholders and if you serve any residential users you must make sure you are engaged with the work they are doing. They have published the process design and developers guide, and are holding a series of workshops for those of you that need to get ready.
Clients serving the business community will soon be able to access material relating to an industry wide business process, still to be reviewed and finalised. The documents will be hosted by trade association FCS so keep checking here for updates.
Ofcom have released a webpage summarising what you need to be thinking about here.
All providers of business services need to be taking steps immediately to follow a gaining party led process to ensure compliance, Ofcom will not accept delays due to OTS not being available for residential customers.
CLI on calls to Ireland
We have now implemented the new rules, introduced by Comreg, which prevent a local or national CLI to be passed on internationally originated calls to Ireland – in line with what we are seeing in many other countries. We have attempted to work proactively with all clients that have legitimate use cases so we can continue to support their traffic, if you have not been contacted but have a suitable use case please do get in touch.
General Conditions on CLI Data
In preparation for the revised General Conditions coming into force in May, we have started to roll out enhanced CLI checks across our network.
The GCs require providers to identify and block calls with CLI data that is invalid, does not uniquely identify the caller, or does not contain a number that is dialable. Furthermore, we are required to:
- Only allow UK CLI which is a 10- or 11-digit number (i.e. a valid number)
- make use of information that identifies numbers which should not be used as CLI
- identify calls originating abroad that do not have valid CLI and block them
- identify and block calls from abroad spoofing UK CLI
- prohibit the use of 09 non-geographic numbers as CLI
Many of these checks have been in place for a while so most clients will notice no difference, however we do urge all clients to check they are not inadvertently having traffic blocked through malformed CLI, something that should be simple to fix.
For Ofcom’s statement please click here.
PSTN (WLR) Shutdown – migration to fibre
With a national stop sell looming we are urging all of our WLR clients to review their installations and start planning for a migration to FTTP or SoGEA. We can offer both solutions where available and are ready to handle number porting for you too so your customer can keep their number.
Visit our website or give us a call for more details.
Comms Council UK have just released a webpage designed to help service providers navigate the IP migration and provides useful information they can signpost for their customers too, visit https://commscouncil.uk/the-great-voice-switchover/
Welcome to our first Non-Executive Director – Simon Burkhardt
We are delighted to welcome Simon Burckhardt on the board as a non-executive director. Simon’s career extends over 25 years in telecoms including roles as CEO of Kelly Communications, Managing Director at both Vonage UK and Connexin, and a number of senior roles within telecoms major companies including BT, Telefonica and Ooredoo. Simon also has non-exec roles on the board of the VoIP provider bOnline and Comms Council UK.
With so much experience and knowledge in this industry we are very excited to see how Simon can help our ongoing growth and success.
What’s on our minds…
We checked in with the support team to see what’s keeping them busy at the moment and this month they are particularly busy with the proactive work we are doing to ensure our clients are managing their CLIs correctly and all legitimate traffic is being correctly routed.
Alongside that they are getting a few enquiries about how to find our documentation so here is a link to help anyone that wants to review our guides, contracts and other useful information at your convenience: https://www.magrathea-telecom.co.uk/clientinfo/
As always here at Magrathea we appreciate your comments and feedback, if there is anything you would like to contact us about, or you would like to opt out of receiving future newsletters, please email info@magrathea-telecom.co.uk