Posted on: 28th July 2022, by Magrathea
Welcome to the latest edition of the Magrathea Newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
Ofcom opens monitoring programme for GC compliance
Ofcom have recently announced a monitoring programme to look into whether telecoms providers are complying with the General Conditions around access to Emergency Services.
The outline of their current monitoring programme is focused around consumer access to emergency services during power outages. This is important, but will become even more so as we see the UK digital telephony migration forge forwards as the copper switch off draws closer. The nature of the beast is that digital technology needs on site power to work whereas the traditional copper does not and so provision for telephony to continue to function in the event of a power cut needs to be provided.
Access to the emergency services is arguably one of the most important aspects of providing a telephony service although we hope that we’d never have to use it – but if you do need to dial it, it needs to work!
Ofcom have released extensive guidelines about their expectations in this area, and their guidelines on maintaining emergency calling access during a power cut published in 2018 are worth a read to refresh your knowledge: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/123118/guidance-emergency-access-power-cut.pdf
With the recent obligation to provide BSL video relay for Emergency Calls and this renewed focus on provision during power cuts, now would seem like a prudent time to review your compliance in all areas to this particular General Condition.
The General Conditions can be viewed in full here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/information-for-industry/telecoms-competition-regulation/general-conditions-of-entitlement
Magrathea offers a reliable and fully tested service to connect your customer’s calls to the Emergency Services. To assist with your obligation to pre-submit your customer’s address data to the Emergency Services database, our straightforward APIs can be used for name and address submission.
We can also provide daily reporting, so you can audit your own data against the records you have submitted to the EHA database via our API.
Our experienced team are on hand to assist with any questions you have about day to day issues or the wider implementation of the provision of emergency dialling. We were the first VoIP network in the UK to fully integrate with the Emergency Call Handling authorities and are still actively involved now with the industry and regulatory working groups in this area.
Porting in the UK: Common Issues
At Magrathea our porting team work really hard to ensure everything goes as smoothly as possible for our clients when moving numbers. We understand how important it is to get right and we’re very experienced at sorting out any issues when they arise. Issues can sometimes present themselves as some calls not reaching the ported number (most often mobile originated calls) and also one way audio issues.
Please find attached an information sheet on common UK porting faults, which explains some of the ‘mysteries’ of the porting process – whilst many of them are outside of our control there are steps we can take when things go wrong.
CLI reminder
Please take a few minutes to remind yourselves of your obligations around presentation and network CLIs and the importance of passing CLIs on all calls.
Our guidance document relating to Caller Line Identity can be downloaded from here:
The General Conditions around CLI presentation have been in place for some time now but we are seeing more and more networks tightening up their compliance of this area. If you have an unexpected call failure to a number you know is valid, it is worth making an initial check that your CLI presentation meets the guidance and retesting if necessary, before logging a support ticket.
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!
Number Packages
We offer a complete range of UK and Irish numbers; including geographic numbers, freephone numbers and NGCS numbers. Numbers are provisioned and managed via our APIs, all our numbers have the option to be delivered to you or your client over SIP or IAX, or via our added value services such as fax to email or voicemail to email.
On our standard deal, geographic (01 and 02) numbers are charged at 50p per number per month with a minimum commitment of £100 per month.
We also offer our ‘Low Start’ Numbering Package where customers can take up to 100 geographic numbers available for £180 per quarter. There is no time limit on how long you can stay as ‘Low Start’.
03 numbers are available at no charge to customers on either of these geographic packages.
There are no monthly charges for NGCS, 05 or 07 numbers. Outpayments available can be viewed on our NTS Schedule, which is available here: https://mdh-dev-web-01.magrathea.net/wp-content/uploads/Annex-2-UK-NGN-1.pdf
If you are interested in taking numbering services from us, or adding different number types to the numbering you already take, please contact our support team who will be very happy to help.
Emergency Services in Ireland
In addition to access to Emergency Services in the UK, our service enables you to offer your users the ability to make emergency calls from their VoIP devices to the Emergency Services in the Republic of Ireland. We can handle both the emergency services calls themselves, as well as the submission of location information to the ECAS database. If this service is of interest to you, please contact support@magrathea-telecom.co.uk for more information and pricing.
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/
Magrathea Team News
Our technical team has expanded and we are pleased to announce that David Higgins has joined us as Technical Support Specialist. David has a great deal of experience in this area, he is very enthusiastic about taking on this role with us here at Magrathea and we are very fortunate to have him on board!
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