A few months ago we signalled our intention to open up the Simwood network so you could route calls through us from or to other carriers, a.k.a. BYoC.
There are numerous benefits here. For example, let’s say Magrathea won’t let you port numbers to Simwood but you want our rich capabilities and codecs, or Gamma can’t offer you TLS and SRTP on your inbound calls, or you’re a call tracking company and need webhooks for incoming calls on your Voxbone estate, or you simply need Operator Connect. You can now map those numbers to the Simwood platform and we’ll deliver calls to you with the same set of capabilities you enjoy on our own numbers, your hosted numbers, or numbers ported into us. Similarly, you can use Simwood as a proxy for your outbound calls, enjoying Teams, TLS, our rich wideband codecs like Opus, on the way to a less capable operator. As we’ll likely directly connect with the other carrier (assuming their network in the UK exists) their inability to support rich codecs or basic security is less of an issue – the leg from us to you and you to your customer is what matters most.
The other benefit of routing your calls through us is, of course, access to the Potato. Any call crossing our network can access any feature available. So today, that includes call recording but also take a look at the rich AI-based services we’re building for the carrier network. This isn’t just CPaaS, this is a suite of services available at carrier scale to CPaaS platforms, UCaaS platforms or other carriers globally.
Shortly, the first elements of BYoC will be deployed bringing those in our beta programme access to inbound services. Outbound and Teams will follow later but we think this initial release is going to open a lot of doors for our customers. Once visible you can create (using our API or portal) a new BYoC ‘endpoint’, or indeed several. These will give you a unique domain to which you can route third party numbering. Incoming calls to those numbers will be treated exactly like calls over the PSTN; they’ll pick up your account-level routing config, or you can optionally associate the end-point with a trunk and we’ll use the trunk-level configuration. Thus, in both cases your calls from third-party numbering will be routed alongside your Simwood numbering. There is no need to load each individual number Simwood-side and there is no limit to the quantity of numbers you can map at us, so this is truly a way to homogenise and enrich your entire numbering estate, wherever numbers are stuck.
While in beta this capability is free of charge but, naturally, facilitating our competitors charging you ongoing rental whilst we add the value for free isn’t sensible business. We have a couple of very cost-effective options in mind but, as always, would very much welcome your thoughts and input, perhaps via our Community Slack.
I hope you see the unique value in this and really look forward to seeing what you create.
