Telecoms firm fined £900,000

Telecoms company KCOM has been fined £900,000 after flooding led to the failure of 74 emergency calls.

Regulator Ofcom said a probe uncovered a “serious weakness” in the firm’s emergency call service after a telephone exchange flooded in 2015.

The regulator found that KCOM, which runs the main telephone and broadband network in Kingston upon Hull, broke an important rule designed to ensure everyone can contact the emergency services at all times.

KCOM notified Ofcom on 28 December, 2015, that its emergency call service for the Hull area had failed for around four hours.

It said the failure was because of flooding at one of BT’S telephone exchanges in York in the wake of Storm Eva, resulting in 74 attempted calls to 999 or 112 from 34 different numbers failing to connect.

However, Ofcom found that all emergency calls from customers in the Hull area relied on the flooded telephone exchange in York, which was a single point of failure in KCOM’S emergency call routeing.

Under Ofcom rules, KCOM should have been able to automatically divert emergency calls via back-up routes.

The investigation found that, although KCOM did have back-up routes in place, they too relied on the flooded telephone exchange.

KCOM created an alternative route to carry emergency calls that bypassed the flooded telephone exchange in York within two hours of identifying the problem.

Ofcom said it expected telephone companies’ services to be resilient enough “to the greatest extent possible” to connect emergency calls at all times.