Following a competitive procurement process, BT Communications Ireland Limited (BTCIL) holds the contract to operate the Emergency Call Answering Service (ECAS). The Contract provides a comprehensive set of Key Performance Indicators centred on the availability and quality of the service and BT’s performance against these metrics is closely monitored by my Department, including answering 98% of calls in less than 1.3 seconds.
Over the period of five years BTCIL has consistently achieved the metric of 99.999% of ECAS availability. However, on Tuesday 28th June at 1am the system was unavailable for 1 hour 12 minutes. ECAS technical team immediately engaged, investigated, and identified the issue which was quickly resolved.