By Simon Woodhead
Simwood Partner SIP Trunks are now generally available and we think you’re going to like them.
There’s no sneaky NDAs, no five-year lock-ins, and the ‘boyz’ won’t send you a bill for all your minutes if you dare to go a minute outside the bundle*. Whilst others will mug you, we prefer a fair, transparent and honest approach.
Pick how many channels an end user needs, add that number of trunk-channels to them, job done. You’ll get a bundle of minutes to use for outbound calls on the trunk, shared across all channels in it. Trunks are two-way and retain many platform features such as conditional call-forward (closed, busy, Bank Holiday etc.) which makes them perfect for those occasions where your clients have on-site physical PBXes in many sites and you need to bring them together.
Rates are below, but we expect to sharpen these. Because of our approach – you’re not contracting three or even five years at these prices – if we improve them a week after you commit, all your trunks will benefit. Rather than lock you in to a new three of five year contract for each and every new customer you add (which feels pretty sneaky), you commit to us for a period of time, your Partner pricing varies according to what that is, and whilst you can add or redeploy licenses within that period, they all finish at the same time.
| Tier | Price per channel | Included minutes | Partner Term |
| Silver | £7 | 2000 UK fixed and 2000 UK mobile | 30 days rolling |
| Gold | £6 | 2000 UK fixed and 2000 UK mobile | 12 months |
| Platinum | £5 | 2000 UK fixed and 2000 UK mobile | 36 months |
Now, to put it delicately, we think a number of our wholesale customers would be better off as Partners. In some cases that is a skills issue, in others it comes down to platform features, but mainly it is an economic thing. Times are tough at the moment and people are trying to cut costs, or in other cases trying to accommodate massive growth. Simwood Partner can be the answer to both!
At the Wholesale level we have to seek volume to make things work. We have a minimum spend across the entire account in lieu of hefty entry minimums per product (e.g. others charge £100 per month just to access numbering, with 999 etc all on top). Those minimums, whilst below market, we know are challenging for some customers, and frankly in some cases were challenging long before COVID-19 came along. Simwood Partner has no monthly minimum spend and you can potentially save more money on co-location, transit fees etc. by choosing to not operate your own platform. To see how low-stress life could be, talk to Frazer or one of his gorgeous team!
As mentioned before, one of things we’re doing to help with COVID-19 is waiving the normal £500 set-up fee for migration to Partner – we’ll set you up your own-branded portal and get you ready to put customers on us at no charge; then you close your wholesale account and save money there.
Those Wholesale customers who are already at the Virtual Interconnect or Managed Interconnect level have generally already reached volume in order to justify the investment. At SimCon we launched our Hybrid proposition, where essentially you can just license the platform and use it with your Simwood Wholesale account. You benefit from wholesale pricing on numbers and minutes, but all the features and ease of the Partner platform. For example, sell your customers trunks with minute bundles but buy minutes at wholesale rates and enjoy the breakage. This is a unique proposition in the marketplace not least because we own the entire platform and are not ourselves licensing or reselling any element of it. Talk to us if this can help you!
Lastly, whether a Wholesale or a Partner customer now, you’re not trapped. You’re welcome to migrate the other way in the future, or for example, add Virtual Interconnect to Partner to give you Hybrid. As both Partner and Wholesale have their own APIs and separation at the SIP layer, you can still build your own technical Hybrid too – adding your value where you can do it best, with energy liberated by not having to respond to alerts at 3am. Serverless telecoms has numerous advantages, especially now, but it can be a step on your journey, the right tool for now, not necessarily where your service ends up if you don’t choose that.
We’re here to give you the options to run your business how you choose, now or in the future, not trap or constrain you. Let us know how we can help.
* Out of bundle minutes are charged according to the standard rate deck for your tier
