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Summary

1.1 The National Telephone Numbering Plan designates numbers in the 070 range for Personal Numbering Services. Personal Numbering Services essentially allow someone to be contacted via a single telephone number, regardless of location, and to receive those calls at almost any telephone number, including mobile numbers. For example, a personal number may be used as a contact number by a person who travels in the course of their employment, and wishes to be able to receive calls in a number of different locations. In particular, for the purposes of Personal Numbering, it is the person who is being called, rather than the caller, who is relevant: a Personal Numbering Service offers a service to the person being called.

1.2 Condition 17 of the General Conditions of Entitlement (“General Condition 17”) covers the allocation, adoption and use of all telephone numbers, including numbers beginning with 070.

1.3 On 24 January 2004, Ofcom produced revised guidelines on the acceptable use of 070 numbers to provide further clarification on what it considers to be acceptable use of 070 numbers (the “Guidelines”). The Guidelines were revised to deal with certain issues that had arisen in the context of Ofcom investigations and enquiries raised with Ofcom. By publishing the Guidelines, Ofcom sought to draw stakeholders’ attention to those particular issues (without dealing exhaustively with all potential issues that could arise in respect of the use of 070 numbers in the future), so as to ensure effective compliance with obligations imposed on each and every Communications Provider (“CP”) under General Condition 17, i.e. a person who provides an Electronic Communications Network or an Electronic Communications Service.

1.4 Ofcom’s policy to date in enforcing the proper use of personal numbers (and indeed other numbering types) has been to focus almost exclusively on the obligations of the CP to whom a particular number range or block has been allocated (the “range holder”). The main benefit of this approach is that it enables Ofcom to identify speedily from the National Numbering Scheme the relevant CP that has been allocated the telephone number in question (as opposed to a sub-allocation from that CP to another). This enables Ofcom to access contact details of the relevant range holder without delay, to ensure that the range holder terminating the relevant number(s) can respond swiftly to any apparent misuse.

1.5 However, it has become clear to Ofcom more recently that there may be a number of CPs seeking to avoid the restrictions on the use of 070 numbers by offering services via numbers obtained from a series of different range holders. Ofcom has become aware of some examples of ‘shopping around’ by those apparently seeking to circumvent the restrictions on the use of 070 numbers, with some CPs simply switching between range holders when the misuse has been detected. Such behaviour by an apparently small number of CPs undermines the integrity of the number range and is detrimental to both range holders and consumers. Ofcom therefore proposes to amend the Guidelines as set out in Section 2.

The full document is available below

• Responses
• Personal Numbering - Proposed amendment to guidance on acceptable use of 070 numbers [pdf]
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