Here we go again… although unlike the seminal film starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, it’s ceased to be funny.
Way back when, Ofcom updated the General Conditions to require CPs, subject to some facets of feasibility, to block calls with invalid CLIs. Simwood implemented this, as envisaged by Ofcom, but issued with the likes of BT and EE and others implementing the rules themselves, being the only one following the rules caused huge grief.
Of course, Ofcom’s approach with respect to some serious privacy breaches, such as leaked network numbers etc, left something to be desired, leaving Simwood to deal with angry users of the UK PSTN. If you want to refresh your memory of what we said at the time, here’s one of the blogs on it .
Fast forward to today, and we have Ofcom providing free advertising to BT by talking about how their voluntary adoption of measures has resulted in a reduction in certain calls entering their network.
Suffice to say that double standard and bias will shortly be the subject of some correspondence with our sector’s regulator.
Anyway, today marks the adoption date of new guidance from the regulator about what is deemed to be valid or invalid CLI. Despite how it might be framed, guidance is not actually regulation (the Competition Appeal Tribunal made that clear in 2016), but instead is prose by Ofcom about how it would start assessing compliance without fettering its discretion on what the regulation itself might mean. This gives it a somewhat pseudo-legal quasi-statutory status that can be best described as a parent admonishing their unruly teenagers with an “clean your room or else” speech.
That new guidance, which everyone is getting excited about, really just tweaks around the existing guidance, about what Ofcom would prefer was and was not to be carried over the international gateway.
Emails from alleged peers about “enhanced CLI checks” now abound. Nothing enhanced about checking a FROM and a PAID, which has to be done today anyway (and, as Simon famously pointed out, some manage to bill for what they should block).
So if you’re wondering why Simwood’s marketing team haven’t joined the cacophony of “regulatory briefings” in your inboxes, it’s because it’s not new news. It wasn’t new news in September 2018 and it really isn’t new news today. It’s very old news, and we’ve been doing things in this field now for at least six years.
Nothing changes for any of our customers; our long-standing KYC process (which regular listeners to my rants will know is really a Know Your Use Case process) already looks at what is carried over the international gateway, informs our customers of the rules, and trunk configurations during onboarding and ongoing account reviews, are adjusted accordingly.
And I managed to write all of this without ranting about how obsolete the term “international gateway” is in a globally distributed all-IP world. I might pop up in an upcoming SimCron to do just that though.
