Posted on: 10th December 2025, by Magrathea
Welcome to the December newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
What’s included
- Round up of 2025 (article link)
- Reminder: Managing your account – useful info for the holiday period
- Reminder: Protect your revenue over the holidays
- Service Spotlight: Broadband
- Encrypted CDRs – new guide now available
- Best Practice Guide – Tackling scams, fraud and nuisance calls
- Second Telecommunications Fraud Charter
- NICC Open Forum Summary
- Training and workshops
- Events and outings
- What’s on our minds…
Round up of 2025
Following what has become an annual feature, Tracey has written her wrap up to the year and sends our seasons’ greetings. You can read it in full here.
Reminder: Managing your account
We know that December can be a whirl of events and holidays for many teams so we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to manage your account with us. All clients should be able to check their balance, transfer funds between accounts and collect call records at their own convenience. If you don’t have access to these tools and would like to get setup quickly please get in touch.
In addition, all clients with access to our MAGIC Portal can simply click on ‘The Guide’ at any time to access all of our handbooks, product sheets and other useful information.
Please check you have a copy of our service level agreement to hand, which includes our emergency contact details, should you need them over the Christmas period.
Reminder: Protect your revenue over the holidays
Public holidays can often be an invitation for criminals to target users and networks while they think things aren’t being monitored too closely. Although fraud is often quite sophisticated, taking advantage of advanced technology, we still see far too many cases of simple breaches due to equipment compromises or humans caught off-guard.
This time of year is a good chance to remind yourself of some useful measures you can take to mitigate some of these types of fraud. You can access a useful document here.
Meanwhile, our Restricted Tariff options offer you the ability to limit the destinations that can be dialled through your outgoing calling account. We highly recommend making use of these options during the holiday period when your business customers are unlikely to be making international or premium calls.
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 feature down the left-hand side of your Client Portal home screen, please contact us 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.
Service Spotlight: Broadband
We have been reselling BT Wholesale broadband for a while now, enabling our clients to keep their service ‘under one roof’ with us. It can be ordered quickly via our MAGIC Portal and for more complex installations we offer a managed service, which costs a little more but ensures that your order gets fully supported by one of our team right through the ordering process.
Clients are reminded that if want to check what solutions are available to you at any specific address you can do this via this link (also in our guide). Pricing can be found in our guide which may be downloaded via our website or found within The Guide.
If you would like to learn more about our Broadband offering and get access to the Portal, please do get in touch.
Encrypted CDRs – End to End guide now available
We mentioned last month that this was in the final stages of development and we are pleased to share that it is now available for clients. This new guide covers each step to getting setup with encryption keys through to managing download files, covering all major operating systems.
We are still reviewing alternative methods but meanwhile we hope this guide will make the whole process much clearer and answer some commonly asked questions. You can find it in The Guide or ask our team to send you a copy.
Best Practice Guide – Tackling scams, fraud and Nuisance Calls
As promised last month we have now released an updated guide to align with International Fraud Awareness week and the recent BBC Scam Safe Week. This guide to help clients get to grips with traffic monitoring and reporting issues can be found in The Guide here, via the MAGIC Portal.
Second Telecommunications Fraud Charter
There was some very big news in the industry with the launch of the 2nd Telecoms Fraud Charter of which Magrathea are a signatory. The launch took place on 5th November at BT Tower, organised by the Home Office and was covered by all major national press as well as telecoms publications. Representing CCUK, Tracey spoke briefly at the launch and signed the Charter.
This Charter has measurable expectations of both the mobile and business to business voice market. The key areas of focus / activity are:
- Collaborative data sharing
- Developing a UK traceback solution
- Continuously adapting and promoting best practice guidance
- Improving staff and customer awareness of fraud
- Creating principles for supporting business victims of fraud
And the mobile sector will be particularly focused on the following in addition:
- Operational traceback in voice within 12 months
- Securing SMS and aligning RCS with SMS
- Guidelines for using AI responsibly
- Creating an API for fraud intelligence sharing
Becoming a signatory of this voluntary Charter indicates our ongoing commitment to minimising the impact of bad actors on our network and the wider industry.
NICC Open Forum Summary- 12th November
One of the industry bodies we are involved with is the NICC. As many of you will know this organisation facilitates the development and publishing of the interoperability standards in our industry. It’s able to do this through the work of its members who are from various telcos and agencies giving up time to collaborate and share knowledge; in 2025 alone over 1K hours had been effectively donated by industry to NICC meetings. It works with Ofcom to help regulation become practical and draws on the knowledge of other related bodies to inform its work.
This year the theme of the forum was minimising fraud across the telco industry. We heard from the Home Office, Trading standards, CCUK, Tech UK and Ofcom about work going on in their areas to help minimise the impact of bad actors. Magrathea’s involvement and work with NICC helps us to support our clients with current thinking and knowledge that is happening across the whole industry – at the moment the biggest issues are combating fraud alongside security and resilience.
It’s a really useful day to attend not least because we get to catch up with industry colleagues. See here for more information on NICC https://niccstandards.org.uk/
Training and workshops
The Telecommunications UK Fraud Forum (TUFF) is now offering two Telecommunications Fraud training courses via their TUFF Academy learning platform. Currently only available to members – these two courses aim to provide foundational knowledge around key telecom fraud types, common fraud typologies and detection and monitoring techniques. Upon completion, learners will be equipped to identify, investigate, and respond to telecom and telecom-enabled fraud – strengthening both organisational resilience and wider fraud prevention efforts and will received 16 hours of CPD credit and a TUFF certificate or a NCFE Level 2 Accreditation. More information – including how to join TUFF – can be found on the TUFF website.
We have run our last porting workshop of the year and currently have none in the diary for January. However, if you or your team would benefit then please get in touch so that we can organise a bespoke session for your business, or add you to the waiting list for our next general workshop. We offer these at no cost to clients as we want to help you navigate porting as easily as possible and understanding the industry process and how we specifically support clients is a good way of doing that.
Events and Outings
November has been a very busy month for events and trips out of the office.
Along with the NICC event mentioned earlier, we also attended and sponsored the ‘Best Voice Provider’ category at the ISPA Awards. This was a very glittering evening in a fantastic venue at London Central at the HAC. We were pleased to be able to invite some clients along with industry friends to celebrate another great year of hard work in the world of connectivity. We know these awards demand high standards to meet so congratulations to all of those short listed and especially Voipfone, who picked up the award again this year.
We joined the FCS CSP+ online meeting, their second, helping members to face and deal with the practicalities and challenges facing a business in this industry in 2026. We’ve been members of FCS for many years and, particularly for clients working providing B2B services, you might consider joining if you need help to build more detailed industry knowledge and contacts.
Continuing with the networking theme, we were also silver sponsors at the CCUK Christmas lunch. This is a great end of year event we look forward to every year, not least as it marks the start of holiday celebrations. We value the opportunity of meeting industry colleagues and friends that we work alongside during the year in a more relaxed setting, even if we were terrible at the festive quiz!
Less celebratory but extremely useful were a number of fraud focused events attended by Laura. Not telco specific but gaining knowledge which can help with our ongoing commitment to minimising fraud and bad actors using our network. Particularly pertinent this time of year.
We find its always useful to attend all these events, meeting industry colleagues and others involved in similar work in a shared space is critical to sharing knowledge and experience. We believe that the most important connections we make at Magrathea are not just held in datacentres.
The coming winter months are looking to be quieter for attending events, but there will still be a lot of industry work going on so we will keep you posted on key points.
In the meantime if you’re using this time to plan any campaigns or looking to enhance your voice offering then please contact our business development team to see how we can assist, either by email (sales@magrathea-telecom.co.uk) or call on 0345 004 0040.
What’s on our minds….
Another year has whizzed by …and it’s our half year point in our business year. Next year we will be counting down to our 25th anniversary!
Our main focus at the moment is finishing the key tasks needed in preparation for our network freeze which takes effect on the 12th December this year. After that, any changes to the network will be restricted to emergencies or essential works only. Along with most other large networks, we find this network freeze essential not only to ensure stability as far as possible for our clients but also to give our team a bit of a breather.
We will be here working throughout the holiday period as normal but we will not process any new porting or broadband orders from 19th December until the new year. This is really important as we cannot guarantee that our industry partners can fully support new requests over the holiday period and we would rather pause processing than give sub-standard service.
As we head into 2026 this is a reminder that we would love to hear from you and understand what topics and information you would like us to cover in our newsletter – please email us info@magrathea-telecom.co.uk .
Finally, the whole team here would like to take this opportunity to send our best wishes for the festive season, and a healthy and happy New Year.
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.