Posted on: 5th August 2025, by Magrathea
Welcome to the August newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
What’s included
- Security and Resilience: Use of GPG Keys
- Service Spotlight: Telehouse Colocation Space
- Reminder: Accessing Product and Service Information
- Regulatory Overview:
- Ofcom Consultation – Free-to-Caller Wholesale Regulation Review
- Ofcom Consultation – Tackling Scam Calls from Abroad
- Ofcom Consultation – Review of Call Termination Markets and End-to-End Connectivity Condition
- DSIT Consultation: Proposed statement of strategic priorities for telecommunications, the management of radio spectrum, and postal services
- Update: Data (Use and Access) Act 2025
- Events and outings
- What’s on our minds…
Security and Resilience: Use of GPG Keys for CDR downloads – keeping your data secure
One of the tools we use to secure clients’ data is GPG keys for downloading CDRs. This tool ensures that all data it is encrypted before transfer and remains unreadable during transmission; only clients with the correct key can decrypt it. GPG keys are essentially like passwords or licenses and as such can be regenerated or renewed as needed. How often this happens will depend on our client’s security policies and different expiry dates can be selected by our clients.
When it comes to the date of expiry we will always email ahead of time so clients can refresh the expiry date or generate a new key. Support is always at hand if clients have questions about the process. Please remember if a new key is generated then you will need to send us the public facing half of it. It’s important to note that these keys can only be used to access current data. If you require any historic data please contact our support team.
Service Spotlight: Telehouse Colocation space – helping with resilience and security
A service we have offered for many years, which supports both resilience and security, is colocation in our Telehouse East datacentre space. This enables clients to have a presence in this renowned datacentre, physically connected to our network and can significantly enhance network resilience.
If you would like to know more about pricing and terms, please contact sales@magrathea-telecom.co.uk or find more information in the Guide via the Magic Portal.
Reminder: Accessing Product and Service Information
We know from our client survey and feedback that we need to work on promoting all of our products and services that can help clients, whether that’s our APIs, specific products or our guides on how things work. For all clients we have our web-based client info pages and of course our wonderful support team is here to answer questions. For clients who have access to the Magic Portal, they also have access to the Guide. This is a searchable ‘bookcase’ style resource making it easy to find and download specific resources.
We always want to improve how we provide information so please take a look and let us have any feedback. If you would like access to the Magic Portal then please contact our support team.
Regulatory Overview
As predicted, we face a flurry of consultations as we head into the summer. Over the coming weeks we will be providing more information for clients about specific areas which have the most significant impact but for now if you have not had a chance to catch up with them all quite yet here’s a brief summary of the consultations and statements.
Ofcom consultation: Free-to-Caller Wholesale Regulation Review
In 2013, Ofcom made 080 and 116 numbers free to call for all consumers, including from mobiles. These are useful for enquiries and helplines, they are particularly important for those vulnerable needing access to support without cost. As nothing has fundamentally changed Ofcom is proposing to retain the requirement for 080/116 numbers to be free to caller and are updating the list of terminating providers that are subject to the free-to-caller access conditions. (Pg 73-83). There are no changes suggested but clients should review the list of providers to confirm if the conditions apply.
In principle we agree that these numbers should remain free to call but clients have until the 26th September 2025 to respond. See here for more detail.
Ofcom Consultation: Tackling Scam Calls from Abroad
Ofcom have finally published their proposed guidance on blocking calls made abroad using a UK mobile CLI. They are proposing a ‘withheld and restored’ approach in an attempt to provide the called party with more information on which to make a decision about the legitimacy of the call.
Currently there is no commonly-agreed process for verification of international roaming calls meaning UK providers cannot simply block those calls originating overseas that display a UK mobile CLI. This leaves a large loophole for scammers.
Ofcom’s proposed approach would mean that the international gateway or first UK provider would flag calls from UK mobile numbers as withheld. The call would then be routed via the home network in order to verify if it’s roaming or not. If it is, the CLI would be restored, otherwise it will continue to show as withheld – relying on the called party to question the origin of the call.
At Magrathea, like many others we have spoken to, we feel this consultation has made assumptions about the source of the calls we are trying to address and misunderstood the voice market and supply chain, meaning the proposed approach is wide of the mark. We will be meeting with Ofcom in the coming days to discuss our concerns and will be sharing our thoughts in more detail on our website in due course.
To review the consultation for yourself please click here. Responses are due by 5pm on the 13th October.
Ofcom Consultation: Review of Call Termination Markets and End-to-End Connectivity Condition
This consultation forms part of the 5-yearly market review. Specifically covering Ofcom’s proposal for regulating the wholesale call termination markets that underpin landline and mobile phone services from April 2026 to March 2031. In short:
- Ofcom are proposing that fixed and mobile termination rates remain fixed at their current level and index linking is removed.
- Ofcom are also proposing that end to end connectivity obligations on BT are removed as the market has changed sufficiently on potential choice of suppliers.
We are currently reviewing the implications of the proposals and will be sharing our thoughts on our website in the coming weeks.
For a detailed read of the consultation please see here. We have until the 10th October 5pm to submit comments.
DSIT Consultation: Proposed statement of strategic priorities for telecommunications, the management of radio spectrum, and postal services
The theme of this consultation is about driving growth through secure and resilient services. DSIT is urging Ofcom and Industry to work together with a more pro-active regulatory approach to resilience and security.
The SSP covers ambitions for 99% of Gigabit capable connectivity by 2032 as well as wide 5G coverage requirements. It calls for Ofcom to remedy risks to competition and address concerns about customer care. DSIT recognise that a secure and resilient infrastructure is needed for growth and Ofcom must monitor compliance with the Telecoms Security Act.
We note there is only a very small mention of fraud, which is disappointing considering the efforts of other government departments in this area and the extent to which we think Ofcom need to get behind it. But there is still time to comment on the SSP so have a read of the full document here, responses are due by 18th September.
Update: Data (Use and Access) Act 2025
In our last newsletter we mentioned the new Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and how it has now received Royal Assent and is expected to open up the use of data to benefit innovation and boost the economy. We have now published an overview on our website which highlights some of the benefits and potential concerns surrounding this bill, you can read it here.
Events and Outings
After a very busy June it’s been a slightly quieter July, our external meetings have mainly been focused on how we, as an industry, can combat fraud and head off the bad actors.
Laura Moore, our Client Support Team Lead, presented to law enforcement at the recent ICDDF conference to share how caller ID is misused and how law enforcement and telcos can better communicate with each other.
In her role as CCUK chair, Tracey has also been involved in government led discussions around what can be done to assist our industry in sharing information, particularly in the KYC work as an industry we all need to do.
August is of course the traditional school holiday time so the calendar is somewhat clearer; but we’re already looking forward to attending Connected Britain on the 24th September and the CCUK Awards on the 25th September, which we are proud to sponsor.
What’s on our minds….
Apart from lots of regulatory reading as explained above, we have also now completed the first month of our new business year. We have a number of key projects on our workstack and clients can follow our progress by viewing our YE2026 Roadmap, now available in the Guide via our Magic Portal.
Outside of work, the MagSteppers did an amazing job on the 26th July, conquering the Thames Path Mighty Hike marathon distance, raising just over £1.6k for Macmillan, smashing their £1k target. There is still time to donate to this fantastic charity which continues to play a vital role for so many. You can find the Just Giving page 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