Ofcom Withdraw KCOM Notification for Emergency Services Outage in Hull

The UK telecoms regulator has had to retract a notification that it sent to KCOM last year, which found “reasonable grounds for believing” that the operator had “failed” to take sufficient measures to maintain uninterrupted telephone access to emergency services.

At the time Ofcom suggested that there had been several related disruptions around KCOM’s network in East Yorkshire and Hull (England) between 5th Feb 2009 and 28th Dec 2015 (here). Under the rules such networks are required to provide “uninterrupted access to emergency organisations” (police, fire etc.), but telecoms networks are complicated and sometimes problems do occur.

As part part of their investigation the regulator issued KCOM with a formal notification of their findings and gave them a chance to respond, but in doing so they also overlooked the fact that their legal enforcement powers had changed in May 2011 and yet their notification covered an even earlier period.

Ofcom’s Statement

The Notification that Ofcom sent to KCOM on 7 October 2016 did not accurately reflect changes to Ofcom’s legal enforcement powers, which came into effect in May 2011. As this technical change occurred during the period for which we found there are reasonable grounds for believing KCOM to be in breach of General Condition 3.1(c), we have decided to withdraw the original Notification issued to the company.

KCOM has already provided its response to the original notification and Ofcom are currently reviewing their feedback, which suggests that a second (corrected) notification may not be needed. We expect to hear a verdict on this issue in the not too distant future. Last month the regulator made a similar blunder in their investigation of Plusnet’s billing practices (here).