Posted on: 9th June 2022, by Magrathea
Welcome to the latest edition of the Magrathea Newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
Emergency Calls Video Relay
The introduction date – 17th June 2022 – for the 999 British Sign Language (BSL) Video Relay service is fast approaching, it is important all CP’s are aware of their obligations. For more information about how this will affect you, please see our article here: https://www.magrathea-telecom.co.uk/emergency-calls-video-relay/
Secure VPN Connectivity
Magrathea can offer a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity service to existing clients. The offering comprises of two dedicated client facing VPN routers located at different geographical locations with two different datacentre partners, to ensure the best level of resilience into the Magrathea network.
A secure VPN connection is set up between the customer network and the Magrathea network, in order to route calls securely. Although the traffic will still be routed over a public link, i.e. the Internet, using a VPN tunnel ensures that all traffic between Magrathea and the client is encrypted, ensuring extra security on calls. Please contact sales@magrathea-telecom.co.uk for more information and costs for this service.
Client Download Area
Just to remind you that our Client Download page has lots of useful guidance and documents available on it including Numbering information including porting and details of ranges we have available for you to access via the API, instructions and product guides and copies of all of our handbooks please do look here https://www.magrathea-telecom.co.uk/clientinfo/
EU calling tariff
As you will be aware, some European destinations have been charging higher rates for ingressing traffic that originates outside of Europe. Each of these countries is only required by regulation to cap prices for calls originating inside the EEA, therefore many of them have chosen to set different rates for calls originating outside the EEA
Many of the networks that carry traffic to these destinations are unable to differentiate between calls originated within or outside the EEA and therefore they set their prices for the worst case scenario and we end up paying the non EEA rate for all calls. This is the reason that our prices have unfortunately looked expensive to some destinations recently on our standard tariffs.
If you are not already using our EU CLI tariff, this is a separate tariff where, if the caller IDs that you are sending on calls are European caller IDs, you will be able to call surcharged destinations for ‘within EEA’ rates – i.e. without the surcharge. This is great news as it is making us very competitive on these destinations!
For more information including rates on this tariff, please drop the team an email at support@magrathea-telecom.co.uk and we can get you started on this tariff very quickly. The tariff uses our same high quality routes and so the only difference you will see is to the pricing.
Reminder About Recycling Ported Numbers
We are aware of a situation that can occur 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!
Co-location space in Telehouse East
We currently have some space available for colocation in our suite in Telehouse East, with prices starting from £370 per month for a quarter rack. The London Telehouse East Datacentre is among the most advanced, reliable and secure IT and Communications facilities in the world, with environmental control, high availability, power redundancy up to 2N+1, fire detection and suppression and multi-layer physical security systems. Please do contact us at support@magrathea-telecom.co.uk if you would like more information.
Data Protection
Since the EU General Data Protection Regulations were launched in May 2018 we continue to be committed and are confident that we always handle personal data in the correct way. If you have any questions about how we deal with personal data, please view our privacy policy on our website and do get in touch if there is anything in particular you would like to know. Our Privacy Policy can be found on our website https://www.magrathea-telecom.co.uk/privacy-policy/ .
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