By Pete Farmer
Once upon a time, everyone started offering international numbering services, mainly because they could at a technical level. A simple API into a provider with a footprint, a SIP trunk and away you went.
Then certain regulators cottoned onto all the flying under the radar that was going on. Long supply chains inhibited law enforcement requests for information, and regimes became more and more restrictive. In some cases, they simply started to enforce existing rules, but we also all know about the change in direction in France, and they are not alone. Between the barriers to entry protecting incumbents over the rise of the silicon valley telco and the recent focus on national security matters in telecoms, the direction of travel is clear. This means the compliance burden is now disproportionate for us to support just a handful of numbers in random countries around the world.
That is why Simwood has revisited its approach to international numbering. We will only now be offering numbers in countries in which we are ourselves fully compliant and also familiar enough with the market dynamics and the regulator to accept the risk of operating in that jurisdiction – that is just the USA and UK.
We recognise that our customers will need time to make alternative arrangements to continue service on the few numbers we already do offer, so we are not going to issue notice to withdraw service on the numbers we have at this time, but we do need to adjust the pricing to better reflect the costs we incur in providing them.
To that end, from 1st September 2022, our Wholesale pricing will be as follows.
Numbers
Zone A – £5 per month, Zone B – £15 per month, Zone C = £20 per month
Associated Channels
Start-Up – £20 per month, Virtual Interconnect – £15 per month, Managed Interconnect – £10 a month.
Simwood is also suspending its wholesale porting rules in relation to non UK/US numbers from the date of this blog.
