Posted on: 3rd April 2025, by Magrathea
Welcome to the April newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
What’s included
- Ofcom Statement: Plan of Work 2025/26
- Ofcom Consultation: Telecoms Access Review 2026-31
- DSIT Statement: Cyber Security and Resilience Bill
- Service Spotlight: Restricted Tariffs
- Reminder: Local Caller ID restrictions
- Reminder: WLR Shutdown
- Business Switching and Porting
- MAGIC Portal demo (web link)
- Workshop invitation: Number Portability – 12th June 2025
- Events and updates
- What’s on our minds…
Ofcom Statement: Plan of Work 2025/26
We reported back in February that we had submitted comments on the draft plan of work and Ofcom have now released the final statement. They also shared a three-year plan here which gives a quick overview of how they see their work evolving and the priorities they want to focus on.
The final plan of work can be seen here and offers no real surprises. Despite acknowledging our comments and concerns in their accompanying document none have made it through to the action plan.
The plan is based around four priorities; Internet and post we can rely on, media we trust and value, we live a safer life online and enabling wireless in the UK economy. Most relevant to our part of the industry are the following workstreams:
- Telecoms Access Review (physical infrastructure regulatory framework from 2026 to 2031)
- Wholesale Voice Markets Review (call termination services from 2026 to 2031)
- Wholesale ATP SMS Termination Review (wholesale pricing review)
- Mobile Investment (promoting competition and investment to improve infrastructure)
- Telecoms and Digital Infrastructure security (compliance with new security framework and introduction of additional regulations through Cyber Security and Resilience Bill)
- Supporting innovation through spectrum availability (including making more available to satellite services and ensuring availability for CNI services)
And Ofcom also include a reminder of number of ongoing programmes, key ones for us being:
- Tackling scam calls and texts
- Digital transitions (PSTN switch off and 2G/3G shutdown)
- Monitoring compliance with consumer protection rules
In their summary of responses, they noted our earlier comments about number portability and switching and they confirm they’ve asked the OTA to work with industry to improve things. They did however say they continue to consider the idea of some kind of common database.
Magrathea and others also called once again for a ‘business champion’ within Ofcom and in response they state that they have a deep commercial understanding of the markets and continue to focus on these capabilities within their team.
Ofcom Consultation: Telecoms Access Review 2026-31
The first of two five-year consultations is now here, looking at promoting competition and investment in fibre networks. The ‘Fixed Voice Market Review’ will follow soon!
Again, we don’t think there are any significant surprises. Ofcom are proposing to retain the rules that require Openreach to give access to their poles and ducts and they propose to continue the varying regulation of pricing depending on competition levels in various parts of the country.
Clients with an interest in this review can find the consultation here and have until 12th June to submit a response.
DSIT Statement: Cyber Security and Resilience Bill
Since it was announced in the King’s Speech in 2024, we have all been waiting for details of this Bill that seeks to strengthen the UK’s cyber defences and increase our resilience. This week, DSIT published a policy statement outlining the measures that the government are considering as well as those that are certain to apply. Watch our website for a summary and our thoughts in response.
Service Spotlight: Restricted Tariff options
Our Restricted Tariff options offer you the ability to limit the destinations that can be dialed through your outgoing calling account. There are two options to limit the destinations you can dial by pence per minute on both the standard and gold route plans – you can choose either 3p per minute or 15p per minute as a restriction.
These changes can be made via our Client Portal or RestAPI, if you are not already using one of these tools or you cannot see the new feature down the left-hand side of your Client Portal home screen, please contact us on and we can very quickly arrange for you to have access to these tools, or to adjust your level of access so that you can use this feature.
Reminder: Local Caller ID restrictions
Alongside the UK, many other countries also restrict calls originating from outside the country from presenting a local CLI. These calls will usually be blocked, rejected or fail, or in some cases have a replacement “network number” added and the call passed as anonymous.
This is, of course, a sensible spam and scam prevention measure, but can have the unfortunate impact of blocking calls presented in this way for legitimate reasons. The list of countries we know taking this action has increased to include India and Spain.
If you experience unexpected call failures or complaints about calls arriving ‘anonymously’ to an international destination, please check to see if the CLI being used could be the reason before reporting a fault with us.
Reminder: WLR Shutdown
Each of our clients who still have WLR lines allocated to them will have been contacted directly but this is a reminder to everyone that all Openreach contracts will be ceasing in December 2025, meaning any lines remaining after that time are on a short-term contract and are likely to be susceptible to significant price and service variations. We strongly suggest you take steps to migrate your WLR estate by December – please do contact our team if you would like to discuss our broadband options.
Business Switching & Porting
Momentum is building in this space and we urge all of you to get involved if you aren’t already. For any of you already following TOTSCo (responsible for One Touch Switching) you will know that they have announced that the OTS hub will be capable of managing business switches later this year and this is likely to lead to pressure from Ofcom for the rest of industry to catch up.
With business switching being generally more complicated and spread over many more retailers than residential, it’s important that we as an industry end up with a solution that works for us. There is no mandate to use TOTSCo for this service, but there is a mandate to offer GPL Switching, and we think there should be competition in this space.
Competition will ensure the best prices and the best service for business providers. With that in mind, we are engaging with a group of ‘managed access providers’ (MAPs), who claim to offer a solution that work independently and/or integrate with the upcoming TOTSCo’s solution, as well as other MAP providers.
There is no date in mind for industry to adopt a new process but after many months of work creating a process and potential solution, we believe it won’t be long before there will either be commercial pressures to get onboard, or Ofcom will challenge GPL compliance.
More information can be found on the FCS website here, including how to contact the various MAPs if you want to understand the solutions that are out there.
The regulatory obligation here falls upon the retailer – the party with the contract with the user – but clearly everyone in the supply chain is impacted and needs to get involved to ensure any solution works throughout the complex ecosystem which often comes with business provision.
Magrathea, as porting provider for many of our clients, has engaged with the various workshops to try and resolve the current challenges around being able to streamline transactions whilst not being a part of the switching hub or having visibility of the retail supply chain. We will send further updates as they become available.
MAGIC Portal
If you are not already accessing services via our MAGIC portal, please take a look at this brief demo video for insight into what you can use it for. We are adding new features all the time and this (and the underlying API) will eventually be the only tool you need to interact with Magrathea’s services.
Workshop Invitation: Number Portability – 12th June 2025 at 11:00
Following the success of our last porting workshop, our next workshop – that is open to all clients – will be run on 12th June at 11am via MS Teams. The workshop will cover:
- A general understanding of number portability
- A step-by-step guide to the porting process
- Best practice guidance for reducing rejections
- The latest updates and industry insights
If you would like to join this workshop or be added to the waiting list for our next date, please email support@magrathea-telecom.co.uk. Bespoke or face to face workshops can be arranged on request.
Events and outings
March was an extremely busy month for our team. We attended the Comms Council UK inaugural Fraud Summit on 5th March. A very successful event designed to bring together all the various stakeholders to find a way to better collaborate and in particular share knowledge to help reduce fraud. There has been significant activity off the back of this even to ensure we get real results from the day, more to follow on that in future newsletters.
We also attended and sponsored the Cavell Summit Europe. A really useful day learning about what’s at the top of the agenda for the wider industry. And then we had Channel Live. Tracey Wright and Simon Burckhardt took part in a panel session and our team were present across both days.
Next on the calendar for us is the ComReg Conference on the 18th June in Dublin. We want to take the opportunity while we are in Dublin to meet as many of our clients as possible, so will be hosting an informal meet up with food and drinks in the evening of the 17th June. We will be contacting our Dublin based clients in the next couple of weeks to start putting an invitation list together with the exact times and location, but if you are not based close to Dublin and are also travelling to ComReg and are available on the 17th, please let us know via email info@magrathea-telecom.co.uk – we would love to see you there!
Over at Comms Council UK there are plenty more events coming up too. The Women in Telecom group are having a face to face event in May, details here. Then in June it’s the AGM and Summer Forum, you can book a ticket here and they are still accepting entries (open to non-members) for the CCUK Annual Awards taking place in September – details here.
What’s on our minds…
As you have read, the month has been somewhat swamped by events and many of the team have been busy attending those, meaning those back at their desks often have greater workload. We are always grateful to them keeping everything running smoothly whilst we get out to these things and focus more on the wider industry.
But March is also the end of the quarter meaning many in the team have deadlines to meet! We had a big push this month on a couple of internal development projects, that meant all hands-on deck for testing and migrating some legacy systems across to tools that are much faster, better supported and more resilient.
Unfortunately, projects like this don’t give us much to shout about in terms of promoting Magrathea, but we know that giving our team access to all the data they need and where they need it, enables them to do a great job for our clients – so it’s well worth the investment to deliver these projects.
This week we kick off the last quarter of our business year, meaning more deadlines set and projects defined, this time a few more internal improvements and a couple of new tools for clients (more on that next time!). We are all fired up and ready to make progress but we had to take a little more time out to say a big thank you and congratulations to Ashley Farr, who celebrates 20 years as part of the Magrathea team this week! You can read more about Ashley here.
As always here at Magrathea we appreciate your comments and feedback, if there is anything you would like to contact us about, please email info@magrathea-telecom.co.uk
Kind regards
Client Support, Magrathea
The information contained in this guidance is for your information only and is not intended to be relied on. It does not constitute legal professional advice, nor is it a substitute for you obtaining your own legal professional advice. Magrathea accepts no liability whatsoever for any errors, omissions or statements in this guidance or for any loss which may arise from your use of this guidance.