By Simon Woodhead
We’re making amazing progress in the USA so I thought we owed you an update.
TLDR: Everything is awesome. USA numbering is out of beta!
As we’ve mentioned before, the US is quite large. It isn’t one market, it is 50. Yes, there’s only one FCC (Federal Communications Commission) but every State also operates their own local regulatory regime and licensing.
While some rather large competitors in the market, trade as “virtual CLEC” or “virtual carriers”, (neither status exists in the real world), Tom (our US COO) and team are busy building actual CLECs for an actual carrier.
We’re approved as a CLEC in five states now, in record time, and we’re on track to have broadly half the US done! There’s nine more filed and another eight ready to be filed. This is a huge amount of work and they’re doing an amazing job.
As a reminder, within a given State, a CLEC is a Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued license to operate in that State. By operate, we don’t mean be a VoIP provider, a CLEC gives us rights to interconnect with other carriers and use infrastructure belonging to the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) such as unbundling or colocation. CLEC gives us huge power through rights rather than the mere ability that comes with certain other approvals.
At the same time, we’re also being approved as an IXC (Inter-Exchange Carrier) in States that require it, giving us the ability to carry traffic between States for other operators.
We’re already offering US numbering and US porting and are very pleased to take this out of beta. However, we’re also working really hard behind the scenes to ensure that all numbers ported into us are natively on the Simwood network as soon as possible. This is happening behind the scenes as we get approval in specific territories. We’re also working hard on enabling you to port into Simwood directly and us issuing our own Simwood numbers across the entirety of the USA.
That covers traffic one way but, as our position is enhanced, don’t forget we can complete US termination more directly and on better terms. This includes US Toll Free which we offer to international customers at zero. This is unique outside the country as far as we know. We can also offer an out-payment for significant volume.
It is a hugely exciting time as we hope you’ll agree. Tom and team are doing an amazing job. He’ll be speaking at SimCon3 to give a further update and answer your questions as it is a complicated environment.
