Ofcom Seeks to Fix Loss of UK Phone Number During Switches

The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has secured £700,000 from the Government’s new £10m Regulators’ Pioneer Fund in order to fuel a project that will seek to make it even quicker to switch broadband or phone provider, as well as to stop situations where switching may cause you to lose your phone number.

Under the General Condition 18 (GC18) rule consumers are supposed to be able to keep their landline or mobile number when changing provider, except in certain situations. For example, it’s not always possible to keep your fixed line phone number when moving to a completely different physical network or exchange area (house moves etc.).

On top of that the increasing move toward “full fibre” (FTTP / FTTH) and standalone broadband connections (e.g. SOGEA) is starting to mean that consumers may want to retain their number, albeit via a different platform (e.g. shifting the number from a fixed phone line to a VoIP service). Some companies support this but others don’t and there are a fair few technical caveats for certain specific situations.

The good news is that we may finally be getting close to some sort of solution. Behind the scenes several ISPs have been working with Ofcom and the Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) to solve this problem for quite a long time and the new funding will help to support that.

Mansoor Hanif, Ofcom’s CTO, said:

“We will be working with industry to explore how blockchain could make it quicker and easier for landline customers to switch providers while keeping their number – as well as reducing nuisance calls. And we’ll expand our research into other areas where innovative technologies such as blockchain could be applied to the benefit of consumers.”

So far as we’re aware this will all be based around a new blockchain using Proof of Concept (PoC) trial from BT and several other participating ISPs. The term blockchain can mean different things to different people, although it usually references some form of shared decentralised database.

Apparently this will foster a new “secure sandbox environment” where voice / phone offering providers (both fixed and mobile) can trial porting and managing telephone numbers using blockchain. This testbed environment will allow users to build interfaces, test business processes and rules, and trial security arrangements. Work will also be conducted on CLI Authentication to counter nuisance/spoof calls.

We suspect it might be awhile longer before any of this turns into a real solution but it’s a promising start toward solving a long running problem.