Ofcom Probe BT and EE Over May 2019 Mobile Network Outage

The national telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has confirmed that they’ve opened a preliminary investigation into a 4G mobile network outage that struck part of EE UK’s (BT) platform on 21st May 2019, which may have left some customers unable to contact the emergency services.

Section 105A(4) of the Communications Act 2003 requires operators to “take all appropriate steps to protect, so far as possible, the availability of the provider’s public electronic communications network” (vital for ensuring access the emergency services). As part of that they must also supply “accurate and reliable” Caller Location Information for all calls to the emergency call numbers “112” and “999“, at no charge to the Emergency Organisations handling those calls.

We believe that this probe relates to an outage that began just after 8:30am on Tuesday 21st May 2019 and lasted for several hours. During that period an unspecified number of customers on EE’s mobile network are known to have experienced “intermittent problems making calls on 4G,” although data (mobile broadband) services and text messages were not affected.

Ofcom will now examine the outage to see whether or not EE remained compliant with the rules during the aforementioned disruption (details). The regulator said they “aim to complete the evidence gathering” phase of the investigation by December 2019, which means that we probably won’t learn the outcome until sometime later next year (probes like this have a habit of taking a very long time).