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. It’s been a few years since the last exercise and the time has come to fluff the proverbial pillows and dust the coffee table.
As part of that exercise, we’ve looked at our product positioning; fundamentally, we have two core offerings – Carrier Services, and a Hosted PBX platform. As awesome as the Hosted PBX is, we’re going to take a little dive into the Carrier Services part of the business for this blog.
At its very core, our carrier services offering is a SIP trunk that plugs into someone’s kit, allocates clean telephone numbers, and sends and receives telephone calls… and there’s the equivalent for SMS too, if our customers are so minded.
This sounds like a very commoditised, homogeneous product, but it isn’t. That PSTN plumbing our Carrier Services customers buy has market-leading fraud controls, feature-rich APIs, an N+4 architecture and so much more. This isn’t the sort of SIP trunk you might get from a spotty teenager in their basement who spun up Freeswitch on a Raspberry Pi and calls themselves a carrier.
We also don’t pretend to be a global juggernaut because we have an API into the DID reseller du jour and make out as if we have a footprint in 190 countries because we’re reselling an aggregator’s long chain of other resellers, with all the supply chain risk that goes with it. We have two core markets – the United Kingdom and the United States, and we know them well. We are deeply interconnected in them, have our own number ranges allocated by the regulatory Gods, and the economics that goes with that investment in infrastructure.
But a look down our CRM says we have customers across half the world (and notably more than one in almost every country); benefiting from that investment in connecting their customers to two of the world’s biggest economies with a feature-rich and resilient service from Simwood.
That made us think – it’s very easy as a UK-incorporated public company to get lost in the woods of British country-specific standards and politics (and for our fine colleagues in the United States, rinse and repeat that statement for a Wyoming incorporated subsidiary and the American equivalents). Yet many of our customers are not; we’ve fearlessly championed the consumer and start-up telecoms business in our domestic markets, but to date, rarely on the international stage. That now changes with our membership of the ITU – and we are looking forward to bringing the same tenacity in defending the interests of non-spivvy in our industry at a global level.
After all, international standards are what dictates the firmware our vendors deploy, and what country-specific bodies like NICC react to; these are important dialogues that will shape our industry for decades to come.
