By Simon Woodhead
We’ve talked already about the things we’re doing to try and help and we’re blown away by the response they’ve received, especially our free video conferencing to facilitate working/learning/diagnosis from home. That has led to thanks from, and conversations with, some very surprising people. But, what more can we do to help commercially?
Well, firstly, we need to recognise that our sector is right on the front-line of enabling the population to continue working effectively. Some of our customers are seeing massive growth and demands for their services and we’re there to assist wherever we can. We’re also speaking to some very large peers internationally who need urgent capacity into the UK; again we’re well placed to help.
At the same time we have a number of good loyal customers who have seen their entire customer base shut down for the foreseeable future. Many customers are of course a mix of both, with some of their customers booming, others struggling. And none of us yet know what the cash-flow implications of this are going to be over the coming months as things start to slow down. What we do know though is that we’re all in this together. So, effective immediately, we are announcing the following measures:
Bespoke commercial holiday
For customers in exceptional hardship, talk to us about what you need and we’ll help where we can. This could be a deferral of minimum spend or extended payment terms for example.
No minimum top-up
Across all service levels we are waiving pre-pay top-up minimums for an initial period to the end of June 2020. Send us whatever you can afford and we’ll add it to your account.
To make this manageable, this offer is only extended to customers who send to the right bank account (i.e. the primary as listed in our bank details), and with the right reference (i.e. only your Simwood account number). Any payments below the minimum which do not go to the right place or do not have the right reference will be delayed and have a £10 admin fee deducted. Our emergency top-up through the portal will also remain unchanged.
Free migration to Simwood Partner
We’re conscious a number of smaller wholesale customers may be better served as white-label partners, saving all the costs of operating your own platform, and avoiding wholesale minimum account spends. We’re therefore waiving the set-up fee on Simwood Partner for:
- Startup customers who wish to migrate and agree to close their wholesale account within 30 days
- Existing Virtual Interconnect / Managed Interconnect customers who wish to leverage our Hybrid proposition as mentioned at SimCon3
Branded Video Conferencing
We put https://meet.simwood.com out there to help people working from home. The response rate was amazing and we have worked round the clock to enable it to scale globally. We’re absorbing all the costs of this through this crisis and you’re very welcome to make it available to your customers.
Whilst it was never our intention, some of you have asked about having this under your own name. We can accommodate this for Simwood Wholesale or Simwood Partner customers but will need to pass on charges. Please speak to us.
Free IP Transit
We do not want to be making unnecessary data centre trips to connect new cross-connects, but customers who have a Direct Connect to us, of any size, are offered complimentary IP Transit. If you do not already have Direct Connect, talk to us and we can queue installation for once this has passed.
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We hope these measures go someway to helping through the coming months but, naturally, please talk to us if there’s any other way we can help each other.
Stay safe.
