By Pete Farmer
We’ve previously blogged about restrictions countries are putting into place on presenting a local telephone number crossing the international gateway…
For example: Germany, Norway, of course the French are mentioned often and now we add Ireland to the list from the end of March 2023 and the UK in May 2023.
The Irish will be blocking calls which originate outside Ireland but are not on a direct connection with an Irish operator. This means that a call centre calling the Irish from outside the Emerald Isle, can still present an Irish CLI, providing that the call centre is connected by a SIP trunk to a bona fide in-country operator.
It’s in a similar vein to the UK’s new rule, which is that operators at the international gateway will be blocking UK CLIs on untrusted routes. Ofcom, like their Irish counterparts, have recognised nuances in the issue, with legitimate use cases, such as tromboning calls for least cost routeing purposes, or call centres making genuine calls from overseas with a UK number.
We’ve been running the flag up the pole for a while: against a backdrop of globalisation of literally everything else, telecommunications is localising – dabbling with a couple telephone numbers for inbound calls in Spain, because you had an API that let you do it, is increasingly a recipe for a very costly distraction. This is, in part, why Simwood recently decided to focus on just its core competencies – the UK and the USA (where, incidentally we have all 50 States now covered).
In the meantime though, if you’re presenting us outbound calls with an Irish CLI from the end of March (and, potentially earlier – some operators may choose to deploy changes to their routeing logic sooner), it may get blocked if the recipient is in Ireland. As with Norway, Germany, France and others, this is a regulatory issue downstream from us, nothing we can do about it, and saying “but so-and-so manages to connect the calls” is not going to wash.
In terms of the UK, the priority for the team has been evaluating our KYC processes in light of another recent Ofcom pronouncement which came into immediate effect last month. As and when we have something more substantive to share with respect to our policy on UK CLI presentation, someone shall be blogging!
In the meantime, Happy New Year to all!
