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Incoming! Take cover.
By Peter Farmer One of the frustrations of being a telecommunications regulatory person is that stuff affecting Simwood and other providers today is a result of consultations and ideas postulated by the government and its agencies years ago. The change of economic model from Fully…
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Blocking spam calls
By Alex Lane TLDR: If your calls to the USA are rejected by us, you need to clean up your traffic because we’ve tightened the screws on our controls. Today I am writing to you to discuss one of the (many) scourges upon the telephony…
Have you ever wondered?
By Peter Farmer One of the banes of life as someone that works in the field of telecommunications regulation is the expectation that we will somehow magically understand precisely what the regulator means within five minutes of them publishing a document. In some cases, such…
Origin Surcharges Claim Another Victim – Price Rises Coming
By Simon Woodhead It has been a while since I wrote about dirty origin surcharges and the harm they’re reaping. The last time in fact was after I spoke in Westminster and had the opportunity to ask some questions of Ofcom, and Chair a session…
Reminder: No dirty surcharges
By Simon Woodhead With origination surcharges coming to UK fixed destinations from August 1st (following mobile on July 1st), we felt the need to remind you that Simwood has taken the decision NOT to pass these surcharges on to our wholesale customers. We will maintain…
3 big wins for Simwood customers
By Simon Woodhead I get so tied up in the ‘today’ and the ‘tomorrow’ that I sometimes forget to look in the rear-view mirror. To be honest, when I do it usually makes me cross to see lies and vanity putting fake polish on turds…
The future of Simwood
By Simon Woodhead When I founded this business nearly 25 years ago, it was the world’s first global gateway between the Internet and mobile phones – both of which looked like they might catch on. At the time, whilst closed-source, it was so uncharacteristically open…
Hello California
By Simon Woodhead As you know we’ve been quietly building Simwood Inc in the USA for the last few years. We’re a CLEC in 20-odd States now which is in itself unprecedented for a foreign-owned company as far as I can tell. But we’ve now…
USA update – we’re 1%ers
By Simon Woodhead We haven’t said much about the USA lately but we’ve been busy! Tom, Cathy and the whole team there are doing amazing things. We’re now at 23 Licensed CLECs, i.e. we’re fully Licensed in 23 of 50 States with others progressing well.…
WVMR Part 6 – Wrapping up
By Simon Woodhead We discussed recently what we’d like to see from the Narrowband Review. Less than 24 hours later Ofcom published its Wholesale Voice Markets Review 2021-2026. This is important and going to govern our industry for the next 5 years, and arguably reshape it forever.…
WVMR Part 5 – A prime opportunity to improve porting?
By Simon Woodhead We discussed recently what we’d like to see from the Narrowband Review. Less than 24 hours later Ofcom published its Wholesale Voice Markets Review 2021-2026. This is important and going to govern our industry for the next 5 years, and arguably reshape it forever.…
WVMR Part 4 – BT’s unchecked monopoly in porting
By Peter Farmer We discussed recently what we’d like to see from the Narrowband Review. Less than 24 hours later Ofcom published its Wholesale Voice Markets Review 2021-2026. This is important and going to govern our industry for the next 5 years, and arguably reshape it forever.…
WVMR Part 3 – What the hell is IPX?
By Simon Woodhead & Peter Farmer We discussed recently what we’d like to see from the Narrowband Review. Less than 24 hours later Ofcom published its Wholesale Voice Markets Review 2021-2026. This is important and going to govern our industry for the next 5 years, and arguably…
WVMR Part 2 – CP Status – we need a new one!
By Simon Woodhead & Peter Farmer We discussed last week what we’d like to see from the Narrowband Review. Less than 24 hours later Ofcom published its Wholesale Voice Markets Review 2021-2026. This is important and going to govern our industry for the next 5…
WVMR Part 1 – Huawei bad for Internet; Huawei good for Voice over Internet
By Simon Woodhead & Peter Farmer We discussed last week what we’d like to see from the Narrowband Review. Less than 24 hours later Ofcom published its Wholesale Voice Markets Review 2021-2026. This is important and going to govern our industry for the next 5…
Remote working at Simwood – free stuff!
By Simon Woodhead Spoiler: There’s some free stuff in here we hope will help you! As mentioned in our latest COVID-19 update, we’re now working fully remotely. We’re lucky as not only are we in an industry that can, we’re in the industry that enables…
New US Availability Zone
By Alex Lane Greetings, We are introducing a new availability zone, and this is going live next week at 21:00 2022-07-06 UTC in North Virginia, US. As previously, these proxies will be served by out.simwood.com dynamically based on geo-dns and SRV. Our updated interop documents…
Wholesale rate update (2022-07-01) – with NO dirty surcharges
We will be updating our Managed A-Z Termination rates and codes on July 1st 2022. As usual, these changes are colour coded in our full rate files available through the portal as below. Whilst this update mostly comprises reductions (especially in EUR and USD denominated…
API

Realtime Call Webhooks
We recently introduced a number of webhooks, and realtime Call Control functionality allowing you to end calls in progress via the API.…
Intelligently Rejecting Nuisance Calls since 2014
Back in 2014, we launched Intelligent Call Rejection, a Simwood…
Commercial

Wholesale rate update (2022-07-01) – with NO dirty surcharges
We will be updating our Managed A-Z Termination rates and codes on July 1st 2022. As usual, these changes are colour coded…
Origin Surcharges Claim Another Victim – Price Rises Coming
By Simon Woodhead It has been a while since I…
Important Banking Update
By Simon Woodhead TLDR: We’ve changed bank details. Please update…
Intelligent Solutions

Thanks for another interesting year!
By Simon Woodhead Wow, it felt odd writing ‘interesting year’ for the first time a few weeks ago, or at least as…
IP Network

New US Availability Zone
By Alex Lane Greetings, We are introducing a new availability zone, and this is going live next week at 21:00 2022-07-06 UTC…
VoIP DDoS Preparations – Mandatory Testing
By Simon Woodhead Alongside recent posts here (this, this and…
Regulation

Have you ever wondered?
By Peter Farmer One of the banes of life as someone that works in the field of telecommunications regulation is the expectation…
Which equilibrium will prevail?
By Pete Farmer Simwood’s views on the recent BT Openreach…
Ofcom’s Christmas Gift to You All
By Pete Farmer Readers who are members of Comms Council…
Security

Coronavirus (COVID-19)
By Simon Woodhead Given the news flow, we felt it was appropriate to update you on where we were with the preparations…
Simwood Awarded ISO 9001 and ISO 27001
by Simon Woodhead Following back-to-back audits, I’m delighted to report…
USA Caller ID changes – SHAKEN and STIR
by Thomas Hadden, COO Simwood Inc. Many of you may…
PSD2 compliance and some great new anti-fraud features
As we mentioned last week, the new Payment Services Directive seems…
Voice

Blocking spam calls
By Alex Lane TLDR: If your calls to the USA are rejected by us, you need to clean up your traffic because…
Mexico Dial-code and rate changes
By Simon Woodhead Last July, we advised of changes to…
Christmas & New Year 2019 Porting Desk
Our porting desk will be operating as usual over the…
White Papers

Our VoIP Fraud presentation at LINX84
We had the pleasure of speaking at the London Internet Exchange’s LINX84 meeting on February 17th regarding our VoIP Fraud research. Below…
Simwood VoIP Fraud Analysis – get your copy now
As regular readers will know, Simwood has operated a VoIP…
Get your DNS in order!
With the Olympics ever closer and our warnings over commodity…