Posted on: 4th November 2025, by Magrathea
Welcome to the November newsletter, combining news from Magrathea and around the industry.
What’s included
- Important Update: Adjustment to our standard customer service hours
- Resilience and redundancy (article link)
- Reminder: Erroneous flagging as SPAM
- Service Spotlight: Encrypted CDRs
- Business Switching & Porting
- Ofcom Compliance: Obligations under the GC concerning emergency calls
- Ofcom Enforcement: Phone and text scams
- Ofcom Consultation: Combatting mobile messaging scams
- Events and outings
- What’s on our minds…
Important Update: Adjustment to our standard customer service hours
We recently shared an update to our Service Level Agreement, which includes a small adjustment to our standard customer service hours. Please rest assured that there is no change to the support available for emergency issues, which continue to be reportable 24/7 via our dedicated emergency contact number.
As we continue to support a growing number of communication providers and maintain interconnects with major UK carriers, our priority remains unchanged: to deliver a resilient, high-quality service that gives you confidence to build and innovate, knowing the foundations we provide are strong and fully supported.
While occasional service-impacting events are an unavoidable reality for all carriers, we have always designed our network to be as self-healing as possible to minimise disruption. Automated call management to avoid failing routes combined with manual and automated testing and proactive interventions mean a multitude of issues across the carrier network landscape remain undetected by the end user. Over the past 12 months, we have further strengthened this by investing significantly in our alerting and monitoring capabilities. These improvements now give us deeper insight and allow for far more proactive maintenance, enabling us to detect and resolve most issues before they affect service. And when rapid intervention is required, our enhanced alerting allows us to pinpoint and respond to incidents more quickly and accurately.
The change to our standard support hours reflects two operational efficiencies: fewer requests being received outside traditional business hours due to the evolution of our portals and APIs, and less need for continual manual monitoring thanks to our upgraded systems.
Importantly, these changes do not affect our round-the-clock emergency support, which remains fully in place. If you have any questions regarding this update, our team will be happy to discuss it with you.
Resilience and redundancy
After a somewhat turbulent couple of weeks for many businesses and applications impacted by a raft of outages and service interruptions that brought some parts of the internet to its knees, we are reminded that it’s critical for all of us in the industry to review and test our resilience and redundancy regularly. Our recent article examines this topic in a little more detail and shares a link to our own guide, available to all clients.
Reminder: Erroneous flagging as SPAM
The current pressure on all providers to reduce the amount of SPAM calls that reach their subscribers means that there is some increased risk of erroneous flagging of calls as SPAM. If this occurs with a Magrathea number, we can work with the onward carrier to ask them to remove the SPAM marker but only once we are provided with a use case for the calls that will satisfy the terminating carriers due diligence. Another important reason to keep your KYC checks up to date!
Service Spotlight: Encrypted CDRs
In our last client survey, we received feedback from some clients that they find our method for obtaining call records overly complicated.
We have a difficult balance to strike with us and our clients wanting the best security, but with as little complexity as we can manage. Handling encrypted data does generally require a level of technical intervention so is not accessible to everyone.
However, we are currently reviewing alternative methods that could run alongside the existing solution and will share more details as soon as we have settled on the best outcome.
Meanwhile, our team have produced a simple to follow guide suitable for all team members to use, along with a supporting video. This will be made available via The Guide shortly but if you would like a copy sent to you please email us.
Business Switching & Porting
Industry groups continue to meet to establish a common standard for business switching, and TOTSCo are now actively onboarding Communication Providers and Managed Access Providers who wish to use them for this service.
As we have said before, with business there is no mandate to use to TOTSCo for switching but there is a mandate for switching to be gaining provider led and from a statement made by Ofcom at a recent industry event, it is clear that they won’t stand for each provider creating their own process – the industry must join up to deliver efficient switching and porting.
Currently the most comprehensive information available is via the FCS here.
Ofcom Compliance: Obligations under the GC concerning emergency calls
As part of regulatory conditions in the UK and Ireland, if you are a provider of VoIP calls you’re likely to be obliged to give your users the ability to make emergency calls. In addition, you must make location information available to emergency organisations.
So, it’s important to be aware that as of the 31st October Ofcom has opened a compliance programme to assess whether regulated providers are meeting obligations concerning emergency calls. They will be contacting a range of providers to investigate whether they have appropriate measures in place. If after initial investigations they find issues, then more targeted enforcement will follow with potential financial fines. For more detail visit Ofcom’s notice here.
We can help clients meet their obligations with our emergency call routing service, please get in touch if you would like more details or download our information sheet, also available in The Guide.
Ofcom Enforcement: Phone and text scams
Ofcom have recently extended the enforcement programme they began in February 2024, for a further 6 to 12 months. Under this programme they have investigated two providers (Tismi and Primo Dialler) in relation to misuse of numbers.
Ofcom also claim to have undertaken a compliance sweep of a number of other providers which has they have concluded “did not reveal any systemic problems across the providers”. But their work continues to work with providers to detect problems and act on any concerns.
Ofcom Consultation: Combatting mobile messaging scams
Following on from a call for input in 2024, Ofcom have recently launched a full consultation on this topic. The consultation is proposing new rules for mobile operators and business messaging aggregators, building on existing best practice, but notably involves a change to the General Conditions. Changes to the GCs are quite rare and this reflects the gravity of the situation with regard to tackling scams.
Their proposals include setting volume limits on pay-as-you-go SIMs, blocking numbers known to be used by scammers, blocking scam messages in transit based on their content or sender ID. They also plan to put a specific requirement in the GCs for mobile operators and aggregators to do suitable due diligence and traffic monitoring.
The consultation can be found here, responses must be sent to Ofcom by 28th January 2026.
Events and Outings
On the 21st October, Tracey, Laura and Hayley had a wonderful time at the CCUK Women in Telecoms 3rd anniversary event, in GeoPlace’s lovely offices in London. It was good to see so many people there and listen to some very interesting discussions.
November is looking busy as we approach the end of the year with some key industry events.
We have the NICC forum on the 12th November. This is always an interesting day, hearing key note speakers on the issues impacting interoperability and hearing about NICC work over the year. This year’s focus is on fraud and scams and Tracey will be presenting on the day on behalf of CCUK. This event is open to members and non-members alike, more details can be found NICC Forum website.
And then on the following day we are dusting off our evening outfits for the ISPA Awards, which this year will be held at the HAC in London, and we’re proud to be sponsoring the Best Voice provider award once again.
There is also the CCUK Christmas lunch in London on the 27th November, there is still time to buy tickets if you’d like to come along. It is always a great event.
Finally, for all those who need a bit of help to navigate the current regulatory environment, we highly recommend attending FCS’s ‘Is your business ready for 2026’ webinar on 26th November – covering all key trends and also business switching. It promises to be a very interesting discussion and is open to FCS members and non-members alike. You can register for this event here.
What’s on our minds….
We can’t believe November is here already … but the chillier days and darker evenings are reminding us!
With International Fraud Awareness Week only a couple of weeks away (16th to 22nd November) and the BBC Scam Safe Week (22nd to 28th November), fraud and scams are very much top of mind during this month.
With this in mind, we have updated our Best Practice Guide for Tackling Scams, Fraud and Nuisance Calls, which we will be available in The Guide during that week. If, however you would like a copy sooner, please let us know via support@magrathea-telecom.co.uk and we will send you a copy.
Thinking ahead to December, please also note that our Porting desk will be closed from 22nd December this year, reopening on Friday 2nd January 2026.
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
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.