We’ve had a fantastic year so far at Simwood, growing our customer base substantially. Whereas in past years this was from new entrants to the VoIP space, we’re now seeing established operators seeking to get higher in the supply chain. We’re also benefitting from “competitors” dropping the ball and the improving knowledge amongst our customers flushing out resellers claiming to be wholesale providers, and making judgements on other genuine wholesalers infrastructure. This is all good but our work is not done!
Much of this growth has come from a service that we realise we’ve never actively promoted and where our proposition really is quite unique. That service is our Virtual Interconnect – Inbound.
Simwood numbering is hosted on our own infrastructure and connection to and from the PSTN is via our own redundant SS7 switches and two-way TDM capacity into multiple BT exchanges and other operators. It is important to note that the PSTN is the interconnection of TDM switches amongst operators and not simply BT; the only way BT can reach Simwood numbers or any other operator is over their interconnect into them. BT is part of the PSTN, the PSTN is not part of BT!
Our ‘Virtual Interconnect – Inbound’ service is, as the name suggests, your own interconnect to BT (and others) over our infrastructure. Other operators may call this ‘number hosting’ but we think that is a little condescending: progressive customers don’t want to feel dependent on an operator, they want to be the operator. Our aim is to give them all the benefits of that in a palatable progressive form.
Our business is about enabling VoIP and we’re trying to offer as wide a path as possible so that you can grow with us, not through us. From renting a few DDIs from £40 per month right through to us building your very own TDM interconnects as a Professional Services project, our business is about enabling you to build a real-time communications business with a product set that can grow with you.
If you are presently using Simwood numbering you’ll be enjoying our leading API (and portal) and in many cases have integrated it into your provisioning processes and CRM. You’ll probably be paying us a rental per number and we’ll be giving you the capacity you need without capacity charges. At some stage, for a multitude of reasons you may wish to have your own numbering and this is where the Virtual Interconnect Inbound comes into play. In essence you obtain your own numbering from OFCOM and those new numbers become reachable over Simwood interconnects, you pay us for capacity used rather than per number and we pay you up to 100% of the income. [We say “up to” as by default we offer 100% but we offer a variety of different pricing models to make this accessible starting from us making no charge for capacity and paying no income!] The great news is that you can administer your numbers on the interconnect in exactly the same way through our API and make use of the standard features we offer such as fax-to-email. The only difference is that your numbers will all be pre-assigned to your account only. We even run them through our gold number algorithms so you’ll know which are the more special ones – of course, we’ll never charge you for using them as they’re your numbers!
Aside from the great API there’s some really compelling reasons why you should use Simwood for this:
- 100% of the income. If we say we’ll pay you 100%, we’ll pay you 100%. We have won customers recently with contracts claiming 100% and them getting a fraction of this. The mere fact that we do what we say and honour our contracts is yielding a substantial increase in income for those customers. It is also very important to note that the 100% is the amount we bill BT and others. This is an insanely complicated process with an awful lot of opportunity for rounding error and assumption. For example, calls to hosted non-geographic numbers have income depending on where they not only enter the operator’s network but also where they originated on the BT network, i.e. there’s one of 60 different rates and which one depends on the co-incidence of 44m sources and the operators points of interconnect. It would be very easy for operators that are less technically advanced to assume a percentage split, or assume the lowest, but we bill every call fully. More importantly, the CDRs that we bill BT and others using are the same CDRs used for reporting to you and if you want them, you can have them. We’ll summarise this on a monthly spreadsheet but we’ll back it up so you know you’re getting 100%.
- Distributed TDM. Routing of phone calls from BT is based on source so all calls to an operator from, say Edinburgh, would go to a defined operator switch reachable over a specific primary BT exchange. There is a backup BT exchange but not a backup switch on a different exchange. In crude terms were an operator to have a switch in London and another in the north of England, southern calls would logically be routed to London and northern calls would go to the northern switch. In the event of the northern switch being unavailable due to power, hardware failure or enthusiastic JCB-ing then calls from the north would fail until the operator telephoned BT and asked them to reroute. Now, many operators have more than two switches so the affected areas get smaller but the principle is the same – an outage at the operator switch is an outage for part of the country’s calls until a manual reroute is enacted by the kind people at BT. We don’t think that is good enough so do it differently! Instead of having switches around the country to improve our own economics, we have switches in Slough and London to improve your availability. The sites are 28 miles apart but connect to all the same BT exchanges. This means that our BT routing doesn’t need to change to handle an outage. Routinely half the traffic goes to each site and a site having an outage is simply a reduction in capacity as all traffic would naturally flow to the other site. We do not need to phone BT and there should be no resulting outage to service on your numbers. Naturally, we work hard to maintain head-room in our capacity for 100% fail-over.
- Distributed IP. We’ve explained before how we operate The IP Network for Voice Business but in shorter form our network is built for voice. We’re not carrying a lot of traditional ISP traffic and mixing voice in and we’re not constrained by the economics that lead commodity networks to routinely congest links; something that is devastating for VoIP. Moreover, our voice services go where our network goes so we have three distinct IP sites, redundantly connected to each other and all three have our VoIP ‘stack’ and are capable of carrying our entire voice traffic should another have an issue. TDM switching is in two of those three. The failover is at multiple layers within our application stack as well for softer failures. We’d urge you to examine DNS and trace-routes from other wholesale providers and judge for yourself how distributed infrastructure really is as network maps show where the network goes, not where the voice kit is, and where the voice kit is doesn’t imply there is adequate capacity or independence from other sites to function in an outage.
- Combined core. There are typically two types of operator in our space: those with a TDM core that have bolted on SIP around the edges and those who are all SIP, possibly with TDM bolted on at the edge. The former generally pass all media through TDM so SIP-to-SIP calls between on-net customers would be bridged in TDM, with all billing and routing logic handled on TDM hardware, and SIP around the edge for access to that. The all SIP people will generally run a soft-switch with application and billing functions on there with TDM possibly around the edge. Whilst we prefer the SIP core, neither is perfect and the reason why Simwood has adopted a combined core, giving us the best of both worlds. That means that all call routing and application logic is handled in our own stack, by SIP, whether the call originates on TDM or SIP. However, call media is handled on TDM hardware with any transcoding in hardware DSPs where we dynamically assess it is appropriate to do so. This enables us to route TDM<>TDM traffic for applications very hard to pass over SIP, such as modem traffic, whilst routing SIP<>SIP traffic using the latest and greatest features available. We introduced HD Voice to the network back in 2010, numerous anti-fraud features since and we will continue adding great dynamic features to our stack whilst offering the stability and speed of TDM and hardware transcoding where optimal to do so.
- Wholesale only. We do not work with resellers / channel as we want our product to be enhanced by customers. We passionately believe in us and our customer adding value along the way for the end-user. Different customers add value in different ways, but they all add value. By contrast the channel resells a product that gravitates to the lowest common quality denominator. Similarly we do not have a retail arm so your customers will not be receiving a call from our “Local Business” team offering them opportunity to ‘come back’. Your own competitors may add value differently of course but you will not be competing with us!
We’re very confident that Virtual Interconnect Inbound is the single best proposition in the market-place for progressive ITSPs. Whether you have number ranges hosted elsewhere and wish to migrate them or wish to investigate getting your own number ranges, please get in touch!
Now, there’s one question that seems to come up a lot from people getting to grips with the supply chain here and we need to deal with it:
Do we use IPExchange?
There’s no polite way to answer that question normally but with the benefit of editing: NO!
BT IPExchange is BT’s answer to Simwood and our competitors. Whilst we could talk at length about the advantages we and our main competitors have over IPX it is really important to understand that we’re all at the same level in the food-chain as IPX, namely just as Simwood is fundamentally a SIP<>PSTN service, so is IPX. Simwood has switches in data centres with TDM connectivity to exchanges. IPX has SBCs in exchanges with IP connectivity to data centres. The fact IPX is offered by BT in no way levitates its position technically or commercially. Whether a Simwood switch or an IPX SBC, we both switch SIP to/from the PSTN over SS7. As as we stated above, BT is part of the PSTN as are we. BT is not the PSTN.
Whilst we know of customers who have been allowed to believe otherwise and we know of IPX users saying otherwise, BT’s IPExchange product is NOT a BT Interconnect and using it does not imply a Standard Interconnect Agreement with BT. IPX is a Managed Service whereas a Standard Interconnect is a regulated and mutually owned facility. The difference is immense!
Commercially IPExchange charges users £5k up front plus a testing fee which is likely to be at least the same level giving CAPEX of £10k+. That is after they’ve taken 20 days to decide whether you’re wanted as a customer. They then charge a few Pounds per concurrent channel per month, in or out. We charge no set-up fee for basic numbering, have accounts open within the hour usually and make no charges for channels.
Resellers lacking confidence in the value they’re adding themselves perhaps like being able to claim an interconnect with BT (which IPX isn’t) and to leverage their reputation. For wholesale customers who are confident of their own value-add and recognise the fact that IPX occupies no senior a position in the food-chain to Simwood or our competitors, and both provide a managed service, Simwood or our competitors are a more sensible option.
When it comes to Virtual Interconnect Inbound, the difference is more stark. We offer 100% of the wholesale income as defined in BT’s wholesale Carrier Price List (CPL). As a Managed Service IPX can make payments but they are set by IPX and lower than the CPL. Depending on the time of day and number range they can be as low as 13% of the wholesale CPL rate that we’d give you 100% of!
If your have more inbound revenue than outbound charges we’ll pay you. As IPX is its own business unit they don’t like customers who are cash-flow negative. This means you’ll need to pass termination traffic to IPX just to have access to your own income. Before you conclude that is ok, be aware that BT outsource termination to Tata, and Tata offer multiple service levels. BT IDD which is available over TDM and is used by Simwood and many major mobile networks is triple the price of IPX for some routes. It therefore follows that they are not the same routes! BT IDD is one of many carriers we use and we can choose the best one for each destination. Further, with Simwood you can choose the best service level on a call-by-call basis. With IPX you get what you’re given and need to use it if you want to access your income.
We’d also question the use of the words “IP Exchange”. From an IP perspective IPX SBCs are buried deep in BT’s network and from our testing are several hops from the BT edge. That means that even if you operate your own IP network and are large enough to peer with BT, your SIP/RTP traffic will pass a long way over their network, mixed in with retail and general traffic. You can of course pay BT for a direct connection to the remote exchange! Our equipment is in data-centres and where other networks peer with us our VoIP equipment is very near the surface – typically one or two hops inside our edge.
An “Exchange” is widely considered to be a facility which facilitates transactions between parties and takes a fee for doing so – think London Stock Exchange or non-financially the London Internet Exchange. If two CPs connected to an exchange of that definition you might expect them to agree financial terms between themselves and each pay a fee to the exchange for the value-add of enabling and possibly settling the transaction. You would not expect the exchange to dictate terms to them both in a price-list, neither be aware of the others presence on the exchange, and the exchange to make a margin on the transactions. We cannot think of any exchange in the world that operates in this manner and a cynic may say that IPX is the traditional minute-based business model packaged to look contemporary.
We’re very open about our reliability and distributed nature. We would encourage potential customers to speak to IPX users about their experience to date. We have mutual customers and customers won from IPX and we know what they tell us! By pure co-incidence, in writing this we were looking for some facts and the BT Website was unavailable.
Financially, of course BT are huge and in a developing industry some may prefer the solvency of a large player. They have us there as we’re microscopic by comparison. However we are profitable and growing with a solvent balance sheet. As recent results show BT are losing revenue and their balance sheet shows negative net assets of £2.9bn. Whilst huge compared to us, they only this week joined the largest top 100 operators in the world according to Total Telecom which gives some perspective. We work with several of the genuinely big operators.
Finally, we believe in open and transparent innovation. We like to educate our customers and we like to learn. Along the way we happily spend money for valuable IPR in quality products and we make extensive use of the superb Open Source efforts which have enabled the VoIP industry to gain ground. We therefore think it would be entirely inappropriate for us to claim patent royalties from that industry and especially our customers!
It is your call!
Great post and many, many USP’s. We (SureVoIP) are one of your customers for SIP termination and although you’ve totally slated IPX which we use for our 1m+ Ofcom telephone direct allocations, I feel I’ve had to highlight the major reason why we don’t host our allocations with you, which is number porting agreements. You don’t have the amount BT do. You have covered the brand issue though.
Do you have a public list of porting agreements you have as that would be great and prove me wrong.
Thanks,
Gavin.
Hi Gavin
Thanks for your comments.
I suspect you’re right that BT have more porting agreements than anyone else in the industry. As the incumbent they are the first, and sometimes only operator other operators get porting agreements with and those agreements are by definition two way.
You’ll find our list of our porting agreements in our May special offer at http://blog.simwood.com/2013/05/special-offer-geographic-number-portability/ . There’s a few others not listed there such as Vodafone (CWW) where the coverage across the country is almost but not totally complete, and to a lesser extent TalkTalk. We also have our own carrier agreements and can leverage their agreements where it makes sense to do so; this grows the list substantially but is something we need to do very little of nowadays.
We find we very rarely have to turn away a port as impossible due to a lack of an agreement but we’re growing the list and responsive to requests from customers. Curiously, a large proportion of the impossible examples I can think of are IPX hosted but I’ll come back to that shortly.
So, yes, if you have a need to port from almost anyone then IPX lets you do that. We know of a few resellers who use it for that very reason. If you need to port from where the majority of prospects have numbers then we and our non-IPX competitors will do admirably.
However, the ability to port in doesn’t relate to number hosting as you’re not porting in to your own CUPID or using your own porting prefix as by definition you’re not using your own porting agreement. Thus you could port numbers in to BT, us, or any operator whether or not you chose to host your own numbers there. I can well understand though that an IPX set-up cost of £10k+ would be hard to justify for porting alone and you may wish to justify it with hosting.
Where porting is relevant though is outbound ports or exports. I’m curious to know how range-holders hosted with IPX comply with OFCOM General Condition 18. GC18 requires a CP to provide Number Portability to its Subscribers, i.e. port out allocations of those hosted numbers. Unlike ourselves and competitors who offer Virtual Interconnect clients the opportunity to include their number ranges under our porting agreements to comply with GC18, in my experience such a feature is not available on IPX is it? The impossible ports I mention above have in the main been range-holders hosted with IPX, where they are not portable under agreements with BT. To return your challenge, what operators can your customers port out to?
Of course, the numbers not being included under BT’s agreement is not a problem as other operators could establish one directly couldn’t they? Well yes in theory but in practice no. I understand IPX enables you to configure numbers for export, i.e. add a porting prefix so operationally it would be possible. However, to establish an agreement there’s certain negotiations take place such as how calls to ported numbers will be routed between operators, often over BT transit. This depends on POIs (points of interconnect) and the agreement and set up process will establish common POIs and the route options for numbers to keep porting conveyance costs controlled. An IPX customer doesn’t generally know IPX POIs and whilst we know and share many of them we cannot control how IPX will use them. In practice therefore establishing a porting agreement with a CP hosted on IPX falls at the first hurdle. Of course, we could just join IPX and then I suspect porting between IPX customers is much easier; a cynic might say by design.
Considering we’re not aware of anybody hosted there with a substantial number of customers (number counts are irrelevant if they’re not in use) we have yet to find the energy to pursue porting with an IPX hosted range-holder. I don’t know off-hand of other operators who have, the result being that IPX hosted CPs become islands where the CP can port in under BT’s agreements but their customers possibly can’t port out. That may appeal to some CPs but isn’t in keeping with an open and fair industry let alone compliance with GC18.
I’d be very interested in your thoughts.
Kind regards
Simon
Hi Simon,
livefrye only allows 8000 characters on a reply. Can you lift that? My comments need to be in context rather then a fresh post.
Thanks.
@surevoip my understanding is this is a limitation of livefyre, perhaps you can split your comments across multiple replies ?
I give up. I’ve re-formatted twice now after a paste and livefyre just sticks it in to one massive paragraph.
Will try tomorrow.
Seems to be a gedit issue, LibreOffice paste is fine 🙂
> Hi Gavin
Good evening!
> Thanks for your comments.
Pleasure talking to someone who knows their stuff as always!
> I suspect you’re right that BT have more porting agreements than anyone else in the industry. As the incumbent they are the first, and sometimes only operator other operators get porting agreements with and those agreements are by definition two way.
>
Correct. In your experience, what is the lead time for completing a new agreement? With IPX it’s 45 days for someone not on the list to the day.
> You’ll find our list of our porting agreements in our May special offer at http://blog.simwood.com/2013/05/special-offer-geographic-number-portability/ . There’s a few others not listed there such as Vodafone (CWW) where the coverage across the country is almost but not totally complete, and to a lesser extent TalkTalk. We also have our own carrier agreements and can leverage their agreements where it makes sense to do so; this grows the list substantially but is something we need to do very little of nowadays.
>
And I presume these are two-way?
> We find we very rarely have to turn away a port as impossible due to a lack of an agreement but we’re growing the list and responsive to requests from customers. Curiously, a large proportion of the impossible examples I can think of are IPX hosted but I’ll come back to that shortly.
>
What you’ll find is they don’t really get porting and GC18. The major issue we have with IPX exporting is we can not export to another IPX customer since we are a range holder and an IPX customer. That is about to be resolved though and is a technical issue within BTW.
> So, yes, if you have a need to port from almost anyone then IPX lets you do that. We know of a few resellers who use it for that very reason. If you need to port from where the majority of prospects have numbers then we and our non-IPX competitors will do admirably.
>
Understood.
> However, the ability to port in doesn’t relate to number hosting as you’re not porting in to your own CUPID or using your own porting prefix as by definition you’re not using your own porting agreement. Thus you could port numbers in to BT, us, or any operator whether or not you chose to host your own numbers there. I can well understand though that an IPX set-up cost of £10k+ would be hard to justify for porting alone and you may wish to justify it with hosting.
>
That is true. But the other plus point for IPX is if we port in from anyone and there is an issue with Openreach switching them over or with the LCP then when BT call them they pay attention. Not sure what experience you’ve had when a port-in has worked then failed and then you try to tell them to fix it. We have been hit with the “win-back” rubbish too which is unbelievable.
> Where porting is relevant though is outbound ports or exports. I’m curious to know how range-holders hosted with IPX comply with OFCOM General Condition 18. GC18 requires a CP to provide Number Portability to its Subscribers, i.e. port out allocations of those hosted numbers. Unlike ourselves and competitors who offer Virtual Interconnect clients the opportunity to include their number ranges under our porting agreements to comply with GC18, in my experience such a feature is not available on IPX is it? The impossible ports I mention above have in the main been range-holders hosted with IPX, where they are not portable under agreements with BT. To return your challenge, what operators can your customers port out to?
>
As per GC18, our customers, should they wish to move elsewhere can do. We would just advise the that we would need to create a porting agreement with the GCP if we don’t have one. I also didn’t challenge you, merely asked some questions and my customers are business customers not wholesale customers so we can’t be compared. You’re a wholesale operator. We’re small and have not yet had one of our own ranges ported away from us, only ranges that have been ported in. In fact, only a few which I can count on my hand (for various reasons unrelated to service or support levels). But as I said we’re small. We have had one of our own ranges requested to port out but it was to another IPX customer and that is an “Import Scenario 7 – Porting of CP own number ranges hosted on IP Exchange to another IP Exchange CP. – Not Supported” so we couldn’t do it as that’s classed as an “Import” for the GCP on IPX. That’s 1 of 5 “Not Supported” which is discussed in the 21 page Geo-Number porting handbook.
As part of the 10-day interoperability testing getting established with BTW IPX a prefix is created and tested. This is also great when signing up to IPX as you “know” it all works at the end and you comply with 999 (if you signed up for that) rather than “live in 2 mins”, which isn’t a bad thing just good to know both parties have ticked boxes and approved configs/profiles. This always goes down well with customers and partners too. But that’s just because BTW use Acme Packet which has tons and tons of options.
> Of course, the numbers not being included under BT’s agreement is not a problem as other operators could establish one directly couldn’t they? Well yes in theory but in practice no. I understand IPX enables you to configure numbers for export, i.e. add a porting prefix so operationally it would be possible. However, to establish an agreement there’s certain negotiations take place such as how calls to ported numbers will be routed between operators, often over BT transit. This depends on POIs (points of interconnect) and the agreement and set up process will establish common POIs and the route options for numbers to keep porting conveyance costs controlled. An IPX customer doesn’t generally know IPX POIs and whilst we know and share many of them we cannot control how IPX will use them. In practice therefore establishing a porting agreement with a CP hosted on IPX falls at the first hurdle. Of course, we could just join IPX and then I suspect porting between IPX customers is much easier; a cynic might say by design.
>
We haven’t done that yet in almost 3 years (Dec 2013 will be our 3rd year) as we have an extremely high customer retention rate, but that’s not to say we wouldn’t when requested as per GC18. In summary, we will obviously never say no and will work the the GCP to get set up as quickly as possible as you would at the wholesale level.
> Considering we’re not aware of anybody hosted there with a substantial number of customers (number counts are irrelevant if they’re not in use) we have yet to find the energy to pursue porting with an IPX hosted range-holder. I don’t know off-hand of other operators who have, the result being that IPX hosted CPs become islands where the CP can port in under BT’s agreements but their customers possibly can’t port out. That may appeal to some CPs but isn’t in keeping with an open and fair industry let alone compliance with GC18.
>
There’s “can’t” and “won’t”. It depends on the CP and how well they know porting. Let me tell you, most don’t have a clue and we’ve dealt with some that say “The customer can’t port away from us” CP’s when importing on to IPX. You’ll know some of them and we’ve even taken over a year in some cases as we won’t give up. We’ll apply that same determination if a customer wishes to move on as the number is allocated to them and is theirs as per Ofcom rights.
> I’d be very interested in your thoughts.
Lot’s of a above annoys me and you’re comment re lots of customers on IPX I think will always stand because once you get to a certain size you’re done with IPX and get your own SS7 or move on to someone like Simwood. I actually don’t know the impact or steps to move 1.2million (entry level amount) away?
Thanks.
> Kind regards
> Simon
Hi Gavin,
I’m shocked IPX users can’t port between each other as that makes the situation worse than I suggested. You not having any porting agreements also lends credence to my suggestion that IPX hosted numbers become an island. I hear you when you say you’d establish them as required but repeat what I said earlier that that is fraught with difficulty where IPX is involved as the usual commercial negotiations are tricky (see earlier comment).
Whilst I’m sure you don’t lose customers (genuinely) I’d counsel you to not rely on a willingness to establish agreements as GC18 compliance – you’ll likely be the last to hear if a customer wishes to leave and that’ll likely be after n other operators have established your number isn’t portable and turned the end-user away.
The suggestion that OpenReach porting team bounce higher for BT is an interesting one and one OFCOM would find it fascinating if there was evidence behind it. In our experience the OpenReach porting team are excellent but fronted by a call centre. We find it is all about relationships and Rachel here is largely full-time porting nowadays, has good relationships and gets things done. Call centre at BT IPX talking to call centre at OpenReach might make a curious alternative combination.
Your repeat mention of OpenReach does make me wonder about something else too. OpenReach are only involved in the porting of BT numbers out or the import to BT. If BT IPX are talking to them for all ports that suggests to me that IPX is effectively where our customer is in the supply-chain. In other words your supply chain for inbound porting is something like you > IPX > OpenReach > LCP. Your supply chain for porting into Simwood (or non-IPX competitors) would be you > Simwood etc. > LCP, with OpenReach only being involved as the LCP where it was a BT range. There’s one less call-centre involved there which I’d suggest makes the process much more efficient!
Your final comment is music to my ears, albeit with one duff note 🙂 “once you get to a certain size you’re done with IPX and get your own SS7 or move on to someone like Simwood”. I’m delighted you consider us a progression from IPX! I also think we’re evidentially more suitable to people who can’t justify the set-up cost of IPX on cost grounds and operationally/technically (and most other ‘lys’) better for others who can. I really don’t see IPX having a benefit in the middle of the field and hope we can take CPs from birth right through and to their own interconnect, or to any point on that journey that works for them. As our Virtual Interconnect Inbound service starts from ‘free’ in return for a longer-term agreement I think it is a no-brainer, but Im biased!
To answer your question about moving 1.2m numbers. The quantity of numbers doesn’t matter – it is 700 odd ranges of irrelevant size. Moving them is very straightforward providing you haven’t already got numbers ported out, which is sounds like you haven’t. Contact us privately if you want to get it under way 😉
@swoody
Hi Simon,
Sorry for the delay. Yes, I agree and as mentioned it has only happened once. We’re free to connect up directly though. It doesn’t have to go via IPX. There really should be only one porting interconnect/commercial approved document. Is that the case in the SS7 world?
I’m sure a customer would inform us and we’d do everything we can to help them do as they wish. Customers are king!
I understand re Openreach, you’ll already have a direct relationship with them but we don’t yet. I don’t think that’s the case as we have to chase hard so IPX can chase Openreach, but sometimes it feels like that.
I’d like to experience more efficiency indeed! Sometimes it takes 4 days for BTW to get back to us on porting detailed query!!!! We’re due to go to the BT Wholesale Roadshow in Edinburgh and kick some butt!!!
I really, really hear you re the Virtual Interconnect and with the knowledge you gain over the years technically I see you’re solution is quicker to work worth, your rates are easy to work with and you have an API. Let me just say that again, YOU HAVE A PROPER API!!!! That’s the biggest USP ever in the wholesale market. But again, when dealing with some of our non-technical partners and resellers (Channel as they get called. Yuck) they get a warm feeling that our numbers live on BT Wholesale…so there’s still that reason to keep it.
Rather than getting underway, I’d be interested in a roadmap and the process involved.
Anyway, let’s move on talking about IPX and all this and make things better by refocusing our energy!
Thanks,
Gavin.