Ericsson subsidiary Vonage fined £700,000 over emergency call outage

A telecoms provider owned by Swedish group Ericsson has been fined £700,000 after some UK business customers could not connect to emergency calls for more than a week, Ofcom has said.

The UK communications watchdog said Vonage, a subsidiary of Ericsson, breached its rules and put its customers at “unacceptable risk”.

Between October 23 and November 3 2023, certain business customers were unable to connect to the emergency services when using desk phones, Ofcom found.

It related to phone calls made over the internet, rather than a regular phone line – known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

It said Vonage did not carry out testing following a software update, which caused the issue, leading to its emergency call service failing.

The company also failed to put in place adequate monitoring steps to make sure it was able to identify an outage affecting emergency calls.

George Lusty, Ofcom’s enforcement director, said: “Being able to call the emergency services can mean the difference between life and death.

“It’s vital that telecoms providers take their responsibilities seriously and if they don’t, we’ll hold them to account.

“Vonage fell short on a number of levels, putting its customers at unacceptable risk.”

Ofcom said Vonage has since made several changes to its processes to prevent future errors.

The £700,000 fine includes a 30% reduction because the company admitted liability and agreed to settle the case.

A spokeswoman for Vonage said it has “taken this incident very seriously”.

“We recognise the critical nature of the service we provide and the serious implications this disruption could have had,” the firm said in a statement.

“We sincerely apologise for the emergency calling outage. Our customers rightly expect more from us and this incident fell short of the standards we hold ourselves to and our customers deserve.”

Vonage said it had since changed how it implements software developments to “prevent such an issue from occurring again”, including “proactive monitoring and alerting systems, and an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement”.