It’s that time of year when I reflect on the year that’s coming to an end. Something I’ve done for well over a decade.
2024 overall has been a good one. It’s been very different to any year in Simwood’s history though.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time this year (having had a depressing landmark birthday) thinking of legacy and personally planning for generations to come. Now when you do that, if it’s not something you’ve ever done, it is difficult to codify what your life is about. It’s no different with a business and if one stands back and says “What is this business for?” it’s hard to pin down an answer beyond an elevator pitch or a business model. In fact so many businesses have no purpose at all beyond those – they exist purely to make money over as quick a period as possible.
I’m pleased to say that Simwood stands for things and 2024 has been one of those years where that’s become increasingly obvious. A business obviously exists to make money. It exists to provide employment and betterment for all those involved and to do so it has to add value for its customer base, but I believe a business can be so much more and I’ve always thought that money is not a game in itself, it is just the scoreboard. If you play the game well you’ll get a high score but chasing the score alone isn’t something we’ve ever done. There’s been numerous examples in 2024 that have caused me pause to reflect on what this thing I created 28 years ago stands for. I’m only able to do that now because of the amazing colleagues that I have, meaning I can step back and look on from afar, like a proud parent.
Some examples from 2024 include Ofcom’s decision to ban CPI+3.9% price increases, something that doesn’t affect Simwood in any way, something that doesn’t really affect Simwood’s customers, but something that we took on as something of a crusade because it needed doing. Whilst we’ll never get acknowledgement as having made a difference we know what we did, when we didn’t have to. Privately we had a classic David and Golliath skirmish, and decisively won. We stand alone in battling dirty origin surcharges and in 2024 have seen first-hand the damage they have reaped on the UK’s reputation and standing globally. I spoke to one exec of a major regional mobile operator who had seen UK volumes fall 85% overnight when they were introduced, and whilst he was cordial and engaged, the UK was utterly irrelevant in his business now having previously been a top 10 cost/revenue line for him. I can sleep at night because I know Simwood is fighting these things and we look forward to giving Ofcom a massive body of evidence to help them rethink them. And then there’s diversity…
DEI, in my view, is woke nonsense imposed on businesses by supranational bodies like the WEF. I totally believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion but I disagree with how ‘DEI’ is packaged and mandated, and how weak minds jump on the virtue signalling bandwagon. I think singling out minorities is the very opposite of what on the face of it it means, sewing division and separation. This can be race, it can be sex, or it can be any other ‘difference’. We’ve seen in 2024 how the meritocratic cultural melting pot of Simwood has performed and how it has done so naturally. We could force it with lunch clubs for white women who ride horses, or brown men who like the gym, but why? Our team are just great humans and I frankly don’t care about their differences. We’ve featured the profiles and stories of some of our colleagues on the blog, not that we ourselves see different colour, religion, sex etc. etc. It has been amazing to see how that has worked for us on the global stage and, for example, I’ve been so proud to see how the ladies of Simwood have thrived in nominally misogynistic cultures, while immigrant colleagues have been embraced by their neighbours, colleagues and our customers. That is what should be celebrated, not virtue signalling and sewing division, because great humans work well with other great humans regardless.
In 2024, Parnita, Fred and Agnes have all brought much needed skills and attitudes to our UK team, all having gone through the Skilled Worker visa program and now being on the ground in Bristol – Simwood and the UK are very lucky to have them. Following the election of the Labour Government (on whom I shall say nothing!), we have expanded our team outside the UK with the addition of awesome colleagues in Georgia (Eastern Europe, not USA). Tekla, Davit, Niko, Sandro have all joined us in the last few months and if you haven’t spoken to them already, I’m sure you will in due course. They give us highly skilled capacity in sales, marketing, operations and development. We’ve even rebelled against convention by allowing ourselves to hire an ‘old white man’ in David Duffett! Our team is wonderful and I really appreciate all of them.
And that brings me to the point. I’m proud of what Simwood stands for. We’re a meritocratic blend of diverse humans that truly cares about our community and the end users who – in the main indirectly – consume our services. We take a long term view and, I believe, do what is right. Some people will disagree, because we get in their way! For example, the customer we terminated because our morals vehemently differed to theirs, or the major industry operator who we wouldn’t assist by putting one of our customers out of business despite the large inducement, or for that matter those roll-ups who will freely try to commit fraud to bend reality to the spreadsheet they raised money against. There’s a lot of filth in this industry, which is depressing, but I like to think we’re doing our bit to make things better and taking stands where it’s right to do so. For all our mocking of, for example, ‘purple radioactive dinosaurs’, I know we’re not alone and it’s great to have the opportunity to work with competent like-minds to make things a bit better; I’d love there to be more of them.
As implied, 2024 has seen our extended team attending more international events than ever. From Dubai and Oman, to Nairobi, Washington and Singapore, even Madrid and London! We’re doing this to pursue two relatively recent strategies: Global Gateway and the Potato!
Global Gateway is a recognition of the harm surcharges are doing to the UK (directly reducing traffic to and from your platforms) and how there is opportunity to save other countries, sometimes the poorest in the world, from being shamelessly ripped off by their mis-application. By offering flat rate termination based on the b-number and not blending 70-odd surcharge decks into one “=max()” rate, embedding the dirty surcharge at cost only, we’re saving them a fortune and hopefully doing a little bit to prevent those calls migrating to WhatsApp or other channels, which is in all our interests.
The Potato, as you’ll have heard if you read this blog often, was a temporary name which came to me when writing a blog hungry. I was hungry following my other half kindly making me a lovely “lunch” of soup. We disagree over whether soup is a meal or not, and I’m finding support! Anyway, the Simwood Potato is a metaphor for how our network is uniquely architected and differs from what I’d describe as the Heinz Sausages in Spaghetti of other networks. I spoke at the CCUK Christmas dinner last week and the below impromptu video (forgive production quality!) really outlines what our thinking is here. It turns out that the global behemoths we’re speaking to over Global Gateway, totally get the Potato and where we’re heading. Some of our UK competitors, by contrast, don’t appear to have a strategy, short or long-term, beyond maximising the Ferrari fund while virtue signalling, and are less warm to it.
The Potato strategy has led to numerous new beta features, such as BYoC and our unique take on Teams, as well as a number of whitepapers expounding our thinking. But it’d be wrong to think that all of our dev work has been outward facing. Like the veritable iceberg, what you see externally is dwarfed by what has gone on inside and underneath. As our industry matures, and as our team scales, there is enormous need for systemisation. Charles and team have had numerous projects to improve internal operations. A lot of them have been around number portability where exports are largely automated and we’ve knocked the sharp edges off imports where possible. The record so far is a customer submitting a porting request through our API and getting an acceptance from the losing CP in 3 minutes, rather than the days it would otherwise take. This isn’t a single integration with some lovely API, but automating disparate human processes and trying to optimise our interaction with crude ‘bots’ on the other side which themselves fail if, for example, a font differs to the one they’ve rigidly coded against. Where the other side of the process remains entirely human, we’ve still been able to get great gains by largely eliminating the latency Simwood-side of requests sitting in queues waiting for human attention. There’s a lot further to go but this is making a big difference and we really appreciate the positive feedback from customers who have felt the difference.
As some will know we provide more residential service to altnets than anyone in the market (by my figures) with anyone who is anyone using Simwood, either at the Carrier Services level into their own platform, or offering their own residential white-labelled service on our Hosted platform. Price-point has always been key in this market, as is automation. While they’ve long had the ability to integrate by API with us we’ve taken that to new levels, with straight-through porting APIs on the Hosted platform (i.e. submissions to the Hosted platform which handle the necessary underlying Carrier Services requests and user mapping, including temporary numbering), hardware ordering APIs and secure provisioning. We’re now in a place where someone can onboard a customer with a handful of API requests done once, even though those processes are disjointed and take time. I don’t believe anyone else in the market is remotely near.
Thankfully we’re relatively insulated from the chaos that is One Touch Switch by virtue of the fact that the voice porting process hasn’t yet changed but customers who are closer to it have our sympathy. I know one of our competitors is keen to make-out things have changed and that they’re special, while another is abusing their dominant position to their advantage, yet again. However, as of now, voice ports take place as they always have. No doubt 2025 will see us needing to take issue with some of the contradictions and confusion here because it isn’t fair or helpful, but I think those we need to involve have other fires to fight at the moment!
As we enter 2025, our focus at Simwood is going to remain on making ourselves as efficient as we can. While others flounder around trying to make the platform economics they’ve locked themselves into work, relying on short-termism like dirty surcharges and structural redundancies, we’re going to keep plugging away, forging our own path. The network and architecture is future proof, our team is growing and awesome, and we’re able to focus our attention on software – software to further streamline and remove cost, and software to give great solutions to our customers to solve tomorrow’s challenges. As I said in the CCUK talk, you can’t solve tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s solutions and so many in this industry rely on doing so. We’re going to continue to add value to empower our far more intelligent customer base to change the world, championing a fair and transparent marketplace. That’s the game.
If you’ve read this far, I appreciate it, and all of us at Simwood wish you and yours a fantastic Christmas and holiday season. Get some rest because 2025 is going to be wild!
