By Simon Woodhead
I’m taking a break from the madness of the very international ITW to share some exciting news in our home UK market. Our interconnect with EE is live.
It has taken 13 months from contract signature for design build and testing, which apparently is a record – normally takes 2 years – and represents lots of hard work by teams at both EE and Simwood. With multiple points of interconnect around the UK, and on the Simwood side at least, calls being routed to the lowest latency available point on the EE network, this represents a huge step forward for our routing depth which improves routing diversity, economics and feature-set.
There are those who will argue a service from BT gives the same but they are separate networks. We are not transiting BT’s network to reach EE, but interconnecting directly. That is where the improvements come from and adds EE to the list of UK mobile providers we do this with which already has O2 and Vodafone on. The only one remaining is Three who we are engaged with – watch this space.
Of course, we also have anyone who is anyone in the fixed line world meaning a huge percentage of any calls you put into Simwood are delivered directly to the destination network. We’re not simply marking up a transit provider that you could deal with directly.
As a result of this change, in the next rate update you’ll see EE move from being in the ‘Simwood – Mobile – Full Transit’ rate breakout to the ‘Simwood – Mobile – Peers’, delivering substantial economic benefits to those of you who have differentiated pricing here.
Technically, as well as the reduced latency and improved diversity by eliminating any transit network, we now have access to the full set of codecs EE support. As you may know, they support wide-band audio for calls between their subscribers and as Simwood is the only wholesale network to support exotic wide-band codecs such as AMR and Opus, customers of yours can enjoy higher clarity and more natural sounding calls to subscribers on EE and their MVNOs. Contrast this with most networks who will operate in narrowband – codecs designed decades ago to emulate the quality of the plain-old copper telephone. We can do better in 2024!
I hope you’ll share my excitement!
