Roaming in Ireland - unable to receive calls from Republic of Ireland numbers

PaulONeillNW
Contributor
Contributor

Roaming in Ireland is "broken" for the past 5 months due to problems with EE's OCS (Online Charging System), and I wonder how many are affected by this (both Business & Consumer)?

  1. We live close to the border, so are frequent visitors to the Republic, and have many connections on both sides of the border.
  2. When roaming in Ireland, no-one calling from a Republic of Ireland number is able to get through. This has had somewhat profound impacts - both business and personally.
  3. Equally, that failure is NOT communicated by way of an SMS notification, or missed call on the device. i.e. you will NOT know someone tried to call you, UNLESS they tell you after the fact. So the problem is hidden, you may be impacted without  realising it.
  4. EE has been invetigating this since August 2024, and has now identified a problem with their OCS (Online Charging System) as preventing these calls.
  5. EE are now on their fourth attempt to fix it (at Level 2 investigations and above) - from the end of October onwards, still no resolution in sight. The lmost recent attempt was to "re-profile their Online Charging System" - however that too does not seem to have worked.

What is most annoying about this, is that we have been paying for a service which doesn't work (5 months now as of January 2025), and the efforts we have had to go to in assisting EE to investigate this have been considerable.

I wonder if there are others impacted by this, who may not have realised it, because of the fact that they get NO failure notifications....

According to EE, this is affecting users in Ireland and Denmark at least...

18 REPLIES 18
bristolian
EE Community Star
EE Community Star

@PaulONeillNW wrote:
  1. EE are now on their fourth attempt to fix it (at Level 2 investigations and above) - from the end of October onwards, still no resolution in sight. The lmost recent attempt was to "re-profile their Online Charging System" - however that too does not seem to have worked.

Level 2 are just a team within frontline CS, who accept particular queries that have not been resolved by basic scripted solutions. I would expect a fault ticket to have been raised and be with offline support teams for an issue such as this.

Those teams will not be customer-facing, and that fault ticket will have a reference number.

There is indeed a fault ticket, and internal EE Engineering tickets also, which the level 2 teams have been tracking.

Unfortunately as for solutions, well, that's a different matter!

PaulONeillNW
Contributor
Contributor

26-Jan-25

Despite further suggestions that EE were planning to roll out fixes, still nothing has been accomplished and the issue is still unresolved. EE are unable to provide ANY timelines, best case / worst case/ anything.

This problem has now been in extistence for 6 months, presumably impacting multiple people when visiting Ireland, which obviously includes any EE customers from Northern Ireland / mainland UK. 

It appears that it is impacting other countries also, Denmark has specifically been mentioned.

Brendan196
Investigator
Investigator

This is happening to me on 2 different phones, not getting anywhere with them only a text every month to say they are working on it.  Also when receiving calls or makeing calls to UK numbers they are cut off after 5 minutes 5seconds...

Brendan196
Investigator
Investigator

Do know if this affects business plans or just private plans. Also did you get call waiting to work when roaming.

 

I too was experiencing the call cut off issue when roaming and calling back to the UK. I was actually on with EE Level 2 support and they had to keep calling me back again. So yes - this is another symptom.

To be honest, we're pretty much NOT roaming now, i.e. just go off network rather than roaming - because at least you get a text message of a missed call when you are back on EE again.

Otherwise, if you roam, you risk callers NOT geting hrough and also NOT being notified of the missed call.

Its pretty much been non-functional for 6 months now. I had a call last week from Level 2 that there was supposed to be a fix getting deployed on 3rd Feb (possibly, but not guanrantted) - so I'm expecting another call back from EE to see what actually happened (if anything). 

It impacts both business and consumer plans ( which is what my partner and i have between us).

Unsure on the "call waiting" aspect, because as I explained - we just dont switch to an RoI network now, at least we know then if there's a missed call from Republic of Ireland customers (which are the biggest concenn for us).

I'm only getting a text but got loads of promises. It's is worse than no
phone because people think your ignoring them because you can't see any
record of a call. They won't let you out of contract unless you pay. Also
do you have call waiting when roaming it's never worked for me. Do you know
if you have a business contract does it work.
Call waiting never worked for me and was told it's up to roaming partners
.eir. at least I'm no alone.