TOTSCo consults on monitoring and improvements to One Touch Switching

TOTSco, the body which runs the broadband One Touch Switch (OTS) platform, believes there are improvements that could be made to OTS performance and has launched a consultation to engage with providers to facilitate collaboration in making these improvements to the system. The system is now 18 months old and has handled around 2.5 million switches on the platform.

TOTSCo has identified some areas of focus:

• Hub match success rate – Performance has been improving with time, but industry observations lead TOTSCO to suggest that this could be improved further.
• Failed messages – A small proportion of messages accepted by the switching hub are not delivered due to either a timeout or being rejected by the recipient. This can then lead to manual intervention being required.
• Lack of response to switch messages – In some cases, there may be a delay in triggering a service cessation due to a lack of response to a switch request
• Lack of response from provider to issues – Non-responsive or slow responses by providers can lead to issues persisting for longer.

As a result of the above, TOTSCo plans to focus on improving and expanding monitoring and publishing more information on this to stakeholders. They plan to support individual providers to discuss performance and share best practices. They will also make a provider-specific report available so providers can identify trends over time and review failure stats against the industry levels. They will also assess whether outage notifications should be published for unplanned outages to a provider’s OTS system.