By Peter Farmer
It’s been a couple days since the team landed back at their various abodes after coming together for 3 days of meetings (and a little touristing) in Washington DC for ITW.
While, for me, living on the same continent means my journey is the shortest, the inevitable layover at a hub (in this case, Toronto Pearson, which I call the Gatwick of Canada but that’s another story) afforded some moments to reflect.
Getting out of the mire of the UK-specific industry for a week, with its quirks like the useful idiots screaming for consumers to fund another TOTSCo like gravy train to provide a central database to do “stuff” for “reasons” is refreshing.
Simwood is increasing its exposure and recognition on a global scale, building on conversations in the US that started in Brazil or Dubai, and developing interesting things for brilliant people. Three days of talking about any call on our network being able to be transcribed, summarised, and posted into Slack with sentiment analysis beats explaining, for the nth time, why no amount of SQL on Azure will fix scrotes gaming porting. Oh, and that transcription – we can demo it here and now, but I don’t want to steal Simon’s thunder on a blog he’s writing I know to be imminent.
You’ll soon see a few more other interesting things coming down the road – we’re increasing our non-domestic (ie not UK and US) directs again in the A-Z and we’ll soon mark them in our rate cards so you can transparently see what (in first choice routeing our side) goes straight to the in country terminator or one hop from it. We are committed to quality and more directs to major destinations underpins that.
This work will also add another major, reputable, global carrier for the “fill the gaps” destinations to get us closer to our goal of a 2-hop maximum for any number anywhere via best in breed infrastructure. If you’ve ever had an RFO from a supplier that said “power-cycling” a magic box fixed disruptions to your users’ businesses, Amy wants to hear from you.
We continue to fight against the UK’s dirty money grabbing implementation of origin based surcharges. This profiteering scheme was concocted by Three and Vodafone, neither of whom we saw all week – perhaps not brave enough to face their peers? Either way, until the new market review, we are stuck with what we have until 2026, and I would encourage those with a grievance to ensure they tell Ofcom precisely what they think of the poorest nations on Earth subsidising Manchester United or whatever the Vodafone marketing team sponsor this week. (I’ll explain why in another blog another time). In the meantime, our unique approach to handling dirty surcharges was welcomed by all we spoke to. Those of a long-standing incumbent nature that have been ripping off bilateral counterparties with surcharges might want to hoard phone books to shove down their pants. Amy is on a mission to sour your gravy train.
For those that follow the blog we met – I look forward to seeing you at Capacity Europe, or ITW Africa next. For those that prefer Simon and Amy’s company, that’ll be ITW Asia and/or Capacity Middle East. On all counts, we are very much looking forward to talking about the next feature drops of the Potato.
PS Routeing has an e. We’re a telco, not Simwoodworking plc. This is a hill I will die on.
