Here we go again. Ofcom have launched another own initiative investigation into the industry’s compliance with its obligations re 999/112 calls.
While unlikely to be solely because of Gigaclear and Vonage and their two recent high profile fumbles, these incidents will have likely formed a major part of Ofcom’s reasoning.
Compliance with the fundamental tenants of these conditions is quite simple.
Allocate a number, it has to have an address loaded. If someone calls 999 or 112 connect the call. Even if you are having an outage. Or we are having an outage.
There’s a bunch of other rules, about informing the end user about limitations of OTT services, and location information in a nomadic world. And battery backups. But the very basic, distilled down, TL;DR version is “If someone calls 999, make sure it’s answered and the ambulance knows where to go”
It really isn’t hard.
Even then, we offer (unlike some of our alleged peers) free 999 onboarding. We’ll walk you through what you need to do, and how to make a planned and legitimate test call. (On that subject, don’t just call 999 as a test randomly, it’ll annoy them, and it’ll annoy us when they vent said annoyance at us).
Our systems interface with the call handling authority and update (within its temporal limitations) what you update with us, in the portal, or via API.
That’s the carrot. The stick is the charges we levy for non-compliance. These charges are a critical source of funds for compensating the member of staff that gets woken up and shouted at by Plod at 3am for your issues!
The even bigger stick are the fines Ofcom can levy on you, and their ability to ban you from offering a telecoms service in the UK.
Also, let me address a couple of still-pervasive fallacies that seem to abound our sector:
- It’s an inbound only number. Yep, heard that one before. No dice. In fact, if I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that while looking at a complaint from the emergency services about a missing address, I’d be on a yacht in the Med.
- It’s VOIP/OTT, and we told the customer to have alternative means to call instead of this service. Yeah, not a thing for many many years. I would suggest some remedial English comprehension classes, and reading the General Conditions.
Many of our customers are exemplars on taking this seriously – everyone else, this is the umpteenth time we’ve warned you – sort it out.
