Our DevOps team, led by Charles, are awesome and I truly appreciate them. Often, I’m annoying Charles with urgency and deadlines, which he rightly pushes back against with a will to do things properly. Admittedly I don’t annoy him nearly as much as Pete does with “how hard can it be” but I need momentum, and our pace of progress has always set Simwood apart. Being fast, but doing it right, is the Holy Grail of development, and a balance we strike quite well.
Every now and again, if I’ve been good, I get left a present and this was this morning’s:
Those that know, know. Yes, this is a voice call from WhatsApp. But so what? This is a call from WhatsApp, into a Simwood number, through the Simwood core. Yes, WhatsApp is a new skewer into (and out of) The Potato. A call to any number registered via Simwood can be made from WhatsApp and routed like any other – this could be SIP into a call centre, Teams, a Conversational AI agent, or even back out to another WhatsApp user (on duty rotation for example). Equally, you can call from any supported Skewer (Teams etc.) back out to a WhatsApp user.
There’s a lot of work to do around user experience and provisioning but this remains an objective for this quarter. WhatsApp have made it really hard and I applaud them for doing so because in doing so they have fixed SOOO much.
Firstly, while they support WebRTC for the cool kids, for the grown-ups they interop with SIP, like a carrier. However, they do it right with full encryption using SDES and variable bit rate Opus as a codec to optimise the quality over variable connections. There is only one carrier on the planet that supports those out the box for all customers on any call: Simwood.
Next, the OSS/BSS is really hard for great reasons…
Unlike the PSTN which has become a sewer for spoofed caller ID and unsolicited calls, a business cannot just call or message a random WhatsApp user. The business’ number first needs to go through an onboarding process to be allowed within the closed ecosystem. We can onboard any number (doesn’t have to be a mobile number), such as a business’ main call centre number, and it’ll be available for a WhatsApp user to discover and call. This is infinitely better than so called ‘Trusted Caller’ rubbish on the PSTN at so many levels.
But even when verified a business still cannot call a random user. The user has to make the first move by messaging or calling the business. That then opens a window for their relationship during which two way messages and calls can be initiated by either party. The window extends with each interaction initiated by the user but if it expires, the user needs to reopen it.
So simultaneously they have eradicated spoofing, creating a trusted environment within a closed walled garden. They have improved security and performance over mobile networks, and they have eradicated nuisance calls, putting the end user in control. Oh, and it just so happens that that walled garden has 3 billion active users!
If we were minute-monkey’s we’d be very afraid. Why would an end-user use the PSTN now, other than to contact someone not on WhatsApp? But then the industry has driven end-users to WhatsApp already with such stupid self-sabotaging money-grabs like origin surcharging. And where can you buy a magic box to do all this OSS/BSS – you can’t!
WhatsApp is coming to Simwood and we think every business amongst our extended user base is going to want a siphon into it for user engagement. With the Potato that’ll be easy for you to provide as an add on to your own UCaaS/CCaaS/CPaaS or bridged to other ecosystems like Teams. Oh, and don’t forget BYoC – the numbers don’t even have to be on-net with us, they can still be with your dino-carrier if there’s some reason they need to be.
For those of a commercial bent, we’re aiming to be a WhatsApp Solutions Partner which will not only enable us to enable our customers but believe it’ll enable us to white-label others. So no need to reinvent the wheel!
Exciting times!
