Posted on: 25th January 2018, by Magrathea
Good morning all
Welcome to the latest edition of the Magrathea Newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
Porting Workshop
We have space available on our half day Porting Workshop next Tuesday, 30th January at our offices in Theale, near Reading, Berkshire. We are inviting any clients who would like to increase their knowledge of portability and the Magrathea porting portal, to join us.
This workshop will be particularly suitable for anyone who uses our porting portal on a daily basis to submit port orders, and we welcome both long term portal users and also those in your organisation who are newer to the process. The workshop may also be useful to managers who oversee the porting process in your organisation, to help gain a better understanding of the process and the pitfalls.
We will cover a background of the industry portability process as well as how to recognise and submit different port order types via our porting portal. We will cover all of the order types and porting scenarios and the common rejection reasons. Our hope is that increasing knowledge in all of these areas will make the porting process run more smoothly for all sides.
If you are interested in attending, please email porting@magrathea-telecom.co.uk as soon as possible.
Network expansion
As you will be aware from recent network maintenance notices, we have once again carried out some major expansions to our network. This increases the number of points of interconnect with BT as well as adding additional capacity on existing connections. We have also doubled two of our other carrier routes to accommodate a constant increase in traffic. This reflects our ongoing commitment to improved resilience, additional capacity and improved scalability.
In addition to the resilience and capacity benefits, those of you concerned about termination revenue will know that the larger the network, the better the interconnect payments available and therefore we are confident that the Magrathea network continues to offer exceptional return for our number hosting clients. If you are considering getting your own number range allocation please contact Hayley West on 0345 004 0040 or sales@magrathea-telecom.co.uk to discuss our hosting packages.
Payment Services Directive (PSD2)
As many of our clients are already aware, there has been a change to the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) which has implications for all providers of revenue generating numbers, effective this month. Please refer to the following site for full details and to ensure you are compliant: https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/revised-payment-services-directive-psd2 . Most of you will qualify for “electronic communications exclusion” (ECE) but this still requires you to register with the regulators and restrict call spend for your users.
As a result we will be issuing a 30 day rate change notice restricting revenue that can be earned on our ranges (084, 087, 09 and 118), or ranges hosted on our network, with effect from 1st March 2018 to reflect restrictions in place from upstream networks.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
As you all know we are only a few months away from the GDPR regulations coming into effect. Whilst we are confident that we have always handed personal data in the correct way to comply with current regulations we have taken the opportunity to carrying out a full audit of our processes and policies as well as adding GDPR specific requirements. Due to the wholesale nature of our business Magrathea holds very little in the way of personal data, however we are of course exposed to some during the normal course of business and therefore we will be updating our terms with clients and suppliers to ensure we are all aware of our obligations and have appropriate policies in place to process and secure data. Updates will follow in due course but meanwhile we would encourage all clients to familiarise themselves with obligations relating to your specific business.
ITSPA Awards Launched!
Registration is now open for the 2018 ITSPA Awards. This is the 10th anniversary year and new categories have been announced to reflect the evolution of the internet telephony industry. The award ceremony will be held at The Barbican Botanical Gardens in London on Thursday 24th May 2018. More information on the categories and details on how to enter are here: https://www.itspa.org.uk/itspa-awards/
ITSPA Porting Survey
The ITSPA Porting Survey is still open for responses! Last summer, the Internet Telephony Services Providers’ Association set up a dedicated group to focus on number portability – the group will be called the Business Switching Task Force. The Task Force has agreed that, in order for Ofcom to take the problems with the fixed line number portability system seriously, further evidence of the scale and harm caused to industry and consumers is needed.
Any communication provider with experience of problems with the portability process are welcome to complete this short survey, and support the important work that the Task Force is carrying out to bring these ongoing problems to the attention of Ofcom and other policymakers. If you have multiple examples of problems, please do feel free to complete the survey more than once as ITSPA is trying to gather as much evidence of harm as possible.
Please do take a few minutes to reply to the survey – it is easy to bemoan the portability process as we go about our daily business but this is our opportunity to constructively assist with future improvements which will have a positive impact on our industry.
You can access the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/HXZGKHD . Any questions about the survey or about ITSPA, please contact ITSPA directly on team@itspa.org.uk .
ISPA Awards
A reminder that the deadline for registration for the 20th anniversary ISPA Awards is next week – 31st January. All of the categories and information on how to enter can be found here: https://ispa.thinkbroadband.com/ The awards ceremony will be held on 12th July – good luck to those of our customers who are entering!
WLR Auto Compensation
Ofcom are currently finalising plans on an auto compensation scheme to protect residential consumers who suffer from service quality failures with their landline and/or broadband services.
It should apply where they experience delayed repairs following loss of service, delayed installations and missed appointments. This is due to start from early 2019.
There will be a published set of standard compensation payments which should be paid to the end user and we will publish more information and the payments that will be available at a wholesale level to our clients in due course.
We are recruiting!
We are currently recruiting for a new team member to join the Porting Team at our friendly offices in Theale, Near Reading, Berkshire.
The person who fills this role will be proficient in Windows Office (Word, Excel and Outlook) and other computer skills such as database experience will be considered favourably. No previous experience of telecommunications is necessary as all industry specific skills will be taught however a good general education and some experience in an office based role are required. For more information on this role, please contact clare.simpson@magrathea-telecom.co.uk.
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