Gigaclear being investigated by Ofcom for potential regulation breach

Ofcom has announced that they have opened an investigation in to Gigaclear for failure to meet regulations that require telecommunications providers to give location information to emergency services. This follows Gigaclear notifying Ofcom that it had issues with its caller location between January 2022 and March 2024.

The location information is supposed to be passed to call handlers automatically when they answer 999 or 112 calls and it enables them to ensure that an emergency response is sent to the correct address if appropriate. This type of information was historically easily available through landlines as BT was able to advise the location of each land line number. Now that many of these services are provided over VoIP, the location can be a bit more fuzzy as you could connect to the same number from many locations, but it is still supposed to be provided when known.

The regulations that Ofcom are referring to which Gigaclear may have breached are: 

GC A3.5 requires that regulated providers, to the extent technically feasible, make accurate and reliable caller location information available for all calls to the emergency call numbers “112” and “999” at no charge to end-users and the emergency organisations handling those calls, at the time the call is answered by those organisations.

GC A3.6(a) requires that, in order to make accurate and reliable caller location information available to the emergency organisations handling the calls to “112” and “999”, regulated providers must comply with certain requirements. Where providers offer an electronic communications service at a fixed location, the caller location information must, at least, accurately reflect the fixed location of the end-user’s terminal equipment including the full postal address.

Gigaclear have issued a statement:

“Ofcom’s announcement of a formal investigation is related to a historic issue with the configuration of Gigaclear’s VoIP service and the resulting accuracy of caller location information (CLI) provided to emergency organisations.This follows Gigaclear self-reporting to Ofcom in April 2024.

In our notification we reassured Ofcom that the configuration issue was swiftly fixed, and that at all times before and after the fix, all emergency calls placed by our VoIP customers were successfully connected.  We have had no notification of, nor are we aware of, any consequences or harm resulting from this incident. We have also assured Ofcom that a robust system of ongoing monitoring and testing is in place to ensure it will not arise again.

Having received notification from Ofcom of its intention to open a formal investigation, we intend to cooperate fully with this, and as a result will not comment further at this stage.”

Gigaclear Statement

Ofcom’s investigation will determine the facts and if any breach of these regulations has occurred.