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Teams and our strategic vision
By Simon Woodhead Heads-up: As I write this I’m hungry, so expect food-based metaphors. Ironically I’ve just had lunch, but we’re into that time of year where my beloved thinks soup is a wholesome meal. I’m of course grateful, just hungry (and probably now sleeping…
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Origin Based Routing/Billing
By Simon Woodhead If you clicked on this post expecting an announcement that we’d thrown in the towel on our stance against dirty origin surcharges and are jumping on board with the latest sleazy money grab, don’t worry. In fact, we’re doubling down with a…
PSTN Switch Off – Act now
By Simon Woodhead Unless you’ve been abroad or are a consumer (but that’s a whole other rant) you’ll be aware of PSTN switch off. For many it has been a sales opportunity but this post is about something else: buy-side and interconnects. If you are…
Porting features (and skirmishes)
By Simon Woodhead One of our areas of focus at the moment is automation and porting has been getting some love, as our volumes continue to accelerate. Many of the resulting tools and processes are internal to us and our team really appreciate those of…
More call tariff options (including NPA-NXX)
By Simon Woodhead Given our position of being a licensed CLEC in 21 States of the USA, and having numbering in 100% of the USA, as well as our evolution to a single ‘global platform’, we’ve introduced NPA-NXX billing. For those not familiar with the…
Domestic focus, global outlook
By Peter Farmer TL;DR: We’re now members of the International Telecommunications Union and look forward to working with fellow members, Governments, regulators and other stakeholders on iterating standards to better our industry. We’re currently in the process of refreshing the website and tweaking the branding.…
Microsoft Teams Update
By Charles Chance I wanted to update you on our Microsoft Teams project because Phase 1 is nearly complete and we’ll be getting in touch with customers who have asked to test very soon! Firstly, what is Phase 1, or indeed any other Phase? Phase…
Latency Based Routing
By Simon Woodhead It has been too long since I got super excited about a new development, and couldn’t wait to tell you about it. That doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around, it just means the development has been far more ‘business as usual’ and…
CLI Filtering Changes (or not!)
By Simon Woodhead Back in 2018 we had General Condition C6.6 (GC C6.6) introduced, requiring operators to ensure CLI was valid on the way in and out of the network, amongst other things. I remember it well as we implemented it fully per the Ofcom…
International Telecoms Week (ITW) 2023
By Simon Woodhead ITW takes place in Washington DC in mid-May and we’ll be there in force for the duration and a few days before. If any customers, peers or prospects want to meet with us either informally over a beer or for a private…
Hello Old Friend
By Charles Chance Manchester is back and it’s big, in fact it’s EPYC! Dad jokes aside, I have some exciting tales about flashing lights and shiny boxes to share.. In Simon’s 2022 ‘Christmas letter’ he mentioned how we’d been working on bringing up a new…
Are you risking your business with your carrier choice?
By Simon Woodhead Happy New Year! We find that the new year is traditionally the time when people like to dust-off relationships, reflect on the past year and put in place provision for the new. It (and the preceding quiet period) are a great time…
Head in the sand is no longer an option
By Simon Woodhead It has been a little while since I’ve opined on the Telecommunications Security Act 2021 and the all-important secondary legislation it enabled, the Electronic Communications (Security Measures) Regulations 2022. My most recent entry is to reiterate how these rules apply to even…
2023 – What a Year!
By Simon Woodhead It is customary for me to write something at this time of year, reviewing the year that is coming to an end and recapping on highlights. Last time was slightly odd, in that I had had some time out of the business,…
Canadian VoIP Fraud
By Simon Woodhead For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been quietly working with journalists and producers from Canada CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” – their equivalent of the BBC’s Panorama – on a long-running investigation into VAT fraud involving VoIP, which they’ve now aired.…
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

Carrier Services rate update (2023-11-27)
We will be updating our Managed A-Z Termination rates and codes on November 27th 2023. As usual, these changes are colour coded…
Our policy on “security questionnaires”
By Peter Farmer Simwood, like all networks and service providers…
Intelligent Solutions

2023 – What a Year!
By Simon Woodhead It is customary for me to write something at this time of year, reviewing the year that is coming…
IP Network

If the BBC did DDoS…
Comms Council UK just put out an e-mail to its members, saying one of its own has been suffering from a DDoS…
Regulation

Sweden CLI blocking
By Simon Woodhead In keeping with a list of countries we’re now losing track of, Sweden has jumped on the CLI blocking…
CLI Authentication: Central database boringness abounds (again!)
By Simon Woodhead TL;DR CLI authentication has some risks, some…
TSRs and Encryption
By Simon Woodhead There’s a bogus narrative circulating that the…
Are you inadvertently enabling scammers?
By Pete Farmer We’ve mentioned it before, but it may…
Security

3CX Warning
By Simon Woodhead We’ve been made aware of a possible serious vulnerability within 3CX. We’re not in a position to confirm this…
Voice

Our stance on “dialler”
By Peter Farmer Everyone at Simwood is very clear on the nuances of our policy towards diallers, having suffered me droning on…
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…