Summary

  • Ofcom proposes making an eight-hour outage at one rural mobile site reportable. Those incidents would generally go into monthly bulk returns, unless other reporting criteria require an earlier response.
  • The proposal retains customer measures alongside site measures. The difficult work is connecting a site's location to the people and services that actually lost connectivity.

Eight hours is an easy number to remember and an easy one to misread. In Ofcom's proposed incident-reporting rules, it helps determine whether an outage at a single rural mobile site belongs in a report. It does not, by itself, say when that report must arrive. Nor does it promise that the site will be repaired by then.

That distinction matters to the people assembling an incident report while engineers are still working on the fault. A qualifying rural-site outage would usually enter a monthly bulk return. But an incident that also meets another quantitative or qualitative criterion may require earlier reporting. Counting the hours is only the beginning of the decision.

Ofcom set out the proposal on 12 May 2026. The consultation closed on 4 August and responses appeared on 1 October. As of 25 October, the final statement was still pending. These are proposed changes, not an adopted replacement policy.

A small number can describe a serious loss

The rural-site threshold addresses a weakness in large customer counts: a sparsely populated place can lose an important connection without producing a large national number. Ofcom's consultation analysis says rural communities may have fewer alternatives. Shared sites can also depend on common power and, sometimes, backhaul. Several network names on a phone do not necessarily imply several independent ways out of a local failure.

The draft policy's table 2 sets out the proposed combinations. For mobile network operators, these include 25 sites affected for two hours, 150 sites affected for any duration, and one rural site affected for eight hours. The relevant loss is unavailability of the main service functions because of a security compromise, rather than every alarm raised by radio equipment.

Customer thresholds remain. For mobile network operators and virtual operators, the draft includes at least 10,000 customers, or 25% of the affected service's customer base, for eight hours; 100,000 affected customers would qualify regardless of duration. Significant incidents below the numerical thresholds can still be reportable. The draft also retains qualitative considerations, including emergency access. Emergency roaming does not erase the reporting obligation.

For the rural-site category, paragraph 3.33 of the consultation specifies monthly bulk reporting unless concurrent criteria require earlier reporting. Elsewhere, the proposed process distinguishes critical incidents, with an initial notification within three hours and a fuller report within 72 hours, from major incidents reported within 72 hours. Applying the name of the 72-hour form to every rural outage would lose that distinction.

The mast's address is not its audience

The proposed rural classification uses the physical site's postcode. That is administratively convenient, but it describes where the equipment stands. It does not directly describe everyone the equipment serves.

BT's response challenges the single-site approach on these grounds. It raises the difference between the site's location and the community served, the effect of travel and access on restoration, and duplicated reports from shared infrastructure. These are a network operator's arguments about the proposed proxy, not independent findings that rural outages cause little harm.

Ofcom's form still asks operators to account for people. The incident-reporting form seeks customer estimates, affected services, emergency access, locations and cell identifiers. Where exact figures are unavailable, historical information can support reasonable estimates. A well-publicised festival or sporting event can make the usual population pattern a poor guide.

That leaves a practical task rather than a tidy substitute for customer data. The site threshold tells an operator to look at a fault that might otherwise disappear inside a national total. The report must then explain what that fault meant. A site, a radio cell and a customer are not interchangeable counting units.

Updated 25 October 2026: This account distinguishes the eight-hour rural-site threshold from reporting deadlines, including the monthly-return exception. It clarifies that customer information remains required and uses the June 2026 resilience guidance. The consultation has not yet produced a final statement.