Posted on: 4th June 2024, by Magrathea
Welcome to the June newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
Client survey – we want your views!
It’s been a year since we last reached out to ask for your views about our products and how we support you and we’re asking for your help again to ensure that what we’re focusing on the right things and supporting you to thrive in an increasingly complex and competitive environment.
Your feedback made a difference and one significant example is the feedback from last year for having a single client portal. As a result of the survey, we prioritised our development work and launched our Magic portal slightly sooner than originally planned. This now gives access to a much-improved porting portal, a numbering portal and The Guide. Over the coming months we will be adding more functionality until it eventually becomes the sole window to access everything you need.
So, to help us understand where we need to focus for our operations, next year’s plans and beyond, please would you take a few minutes to answer the following questions on this survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VKPB8C6
You can remain anonymous but if you are happy to provide your details it will help us tie any comments to the specific services you take from us and enable us to follow up with you directly if needed.
The closing date for completing the survey is Thursday 20th June 2024 and we will share a summary of outcomes in our next newsletter, as well as feedback any actions we plan to take as a result.
Gaining Provider Led Switching & Porting / One Touch Switch (OTS)
Last month we shared a survey, asking our clients how well informed they feel about the requirements of GPL switching and what support they want from us. The feedback was very mixed, with some of you reporting you were fully on the case but others had almost no knowledge at all. Thank you to everyone who took time to respond.
We will continue to try and help raise awareness and have included work on OTS Porting in our development road map for the year. However we do urge each of you to engage with TOTSCo (residential users) and the GPLB-SG (business users) as things are constantly being updated and it’s important to be ready for go live in September.
A copy of our simplified guidance can be found here.
Comreg update
For all of our clients using Irish numbers, if you haven’t already please do have a read of our recent article here. Key points to be aware of include:
- You must register yourselves with Comreg in order to provide Irish numbers to end users (we will provide the form).
- You must ensure your onboarding process includes gathering evidence that the user is located within the area for the number they request.
- You must check calls are originated with CLIs that are assigned to the caller, or they have permission to use them.
More detailed guidance and the sub-allocation forms will be sent to our clients who take this service from us shortly.
Important Reminder not to Recycle Ported Numbers
There is the occasional case of a problem situation occurring whereby a range is imported for an end user, but then subsequently reused by the CP for another end user once the original end user has terminated their service. For example, an end user terminated service with their CP without porting the numbers elsewhere and the CP has reused some or all of those numbers.
Re-using ported in numbers in this way is prohibited under the industry porting guidelines and so you should take care to ensure this doesn’t happen on numbers that you have ported in for an end user.
Once an end user has terminated service on their numbers, one of two things should happen. If part of a range is no longer in use, the unused numbers should be quarantined as they cannot be re-used. If it’s a complete range that is no longer in use, these should be returned to the range holder – we can arrange for this to happen if you email porting@magrathea-telecom.co.uk.
We perform regular audits of numbering to make sure that where ported numbers have been deactivated, they are returned to the range holder where possible but if you can flag these to us as well that is really helpful!
Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) Withdrawal Delays
Openreach notified us in May that the date for all WLR to be withdrawn, December 2025, has been extended to 31st January 2027. This is to give those with more complex needs more time to adapt to the change and find suitable solutions.
Whilst our WLR estate is relatively very small, we continue to encourage our clients to migrate their users in good time to avoid bottlenecks and risk of reduced service as the old network continues to degrade and be increasingly difficult to support.
Now available in our MAGIC Portal – The Guide
Frequent users of our MAGIC Portal may have already spotted a new App available this week. The Guide contains all of the documents previously available via our download page on the website, but is fully searchable so hopefully will be much simpler to find what you need.
We will continue to maintain our website download page so that the documents included are current, however The Guide will contain additional documents, so we highly recommend clients use that as their primary source of information.
What’s on our minds…
With the weather finally starting to improve our thoughts turn a bit more to outside of work, and more specifically ‘outside’. With so many of the team having interests that take place in the open air, from horses and dogs to motorbikes and football, we find this time of year is full of chatter about the fun things that become so much more enjoyable in the sunshine!
Many of the team also put these hobbies to good use and get involved in fundraisers and health and wellbeing initiatives. Already this year we have taken part in events between us, one sponsored by Magrathea will be covered in an upcoming article, but the biggest one we would like to flag to our clients is The Thames Path Mighty Hike, a Macmillan Cancer Support fundraiser.
We don’t often ask our clients for sponsorship but with a few of the team taking part in this one we thought we would share the link and see if we can get a nice big sum of money for this very worthy cause – it all adds up so please donate what you can, even £5 will do great things! https://www.justgiving.com/team/MagMassive
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
Kind regards
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.