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

[PaulONeillNW]

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...

[Brendan196]

Thanks for the update. I received a call last Thursday to tell me they had
fixed the problem with UK calls dropping after 5 minutes and 5 seconds but
I asked about incoming calls from Ireland and call dropped after 5 minutes
so nothing fixed.they then wanted more examples of problem so I said they
had enough examples. Then I asked for a copy of what they have done to
repair the problem since September because I want to contact ombudsman to
see if they will help. They then passed me to other department who said I
couldn't see anything like that but they were to send out forms to send to
ombudsman but I haven't received anything yet. I asked for them to notify
their shops in N.I to tell anyone buying a new phone/contract that it won't
work in Ireland . Won't expect a fix soon.

[PaulONeillNW]

This is exactly the problem we've been experiencing for 8 months now.

Latest word is that this is a software problem at the heart of their OCS (Online Charging System) - which is provided by a separate company. EE are now sending letters to the directors of that company, given that all other technical support avenues have failed.

Equally, the software supplier has indicated that they cannot focus on fixing the issues - because they are concentrating on supporting the billing uplift to support the CPI price increase. Really reassugin for customers to know that EE will be able to increase their charges, whilst still failing to deliver an operational service.

[PaulONeillNW]

I think what they are providing is a "deadlock letter" for the Ombudsman, to allow you to raise the case with them, and which also would allow you to exit your contract.

I can't see them providing you with any "internal details"  of how they are dealing with this (presumably extensive) problem now around their Online Charging System / Billing System blocking roaming calls.

BUT I assume that you would be entitled to any records they have of YOUR interactions with EE under GDPR regulations - which would no doubt speak to the problems., i.e. a DSAR Data Subject Access Request.

As for EE Shops informing prospective clients that their services dont work - I suspect I have more chance of winning the lottery than that happening.