Field note ·
What belongs in an Ofcom-facing quality annex
A regulator annex is not a marketing chart pack. Here is the short list we actually bind when a UK operator asks for a quality note that will sit beside a complaints narrative.
When an operator in England asks for a quality annex that may travel with a complaints or coverage narrative, the first mistake is to reprint the internal dashboard. Internal views are built for daily ops. An annex that may be read outside the radio team needs a frozen dictionary, a named period, and a sentence on what was left out.
We start with availability and retainability because those two figures still appear in most UK SLA schedules, even when the marketing conversation has moved on to speed tests. Latency and packet loss follow if the contract or the complaints theme mentions voice over LTE or a managed APN. We do not add a fifth KPI simply to fill a page.
Geography must be stated in words a non-engineer can check. “Yorkshire and the Humber cluster” is usable if the cell list is attached. “Rural” is not. Emley sits under a well-known transmitting station; visitors from London sometimes assume the whole district behaves like a city centre. The annex should say which cabinets or sectors were in the sample.
Missing PM files belong in an appendix, not a footnote in eight-point type. If Tuesday’s 4G retainability is absent because the OSS extract failed, we write that. Filling the gap with a neighbour-day average looks tidy and will not survive a follow-up question.
Finally, keep screenshots of vendor consoles out of the annex. They date within a patch cycle and they invite a debate about the console rather than the network. Charts we draw from the extract, with axes labelled in the same units as the SLA, travel better.