Wow, it is that time again. I’ve written these since 2013 and love the opportunity to review the year and genuinely thank each and every one of you for being part of it.
Others have copied of course – 12 years later and half a job – both the expression of sentiment and the warnings around VoIP Fraud etc. which we felt we had to get out over Christmas in those days. Some of those messages still apply but the threat is different nearly 13 years later and you’d be sick of me still banging that same old drum anyway. It doesn’t stop the world’s slowest photocopier though, even if it hasn’t managed to replicate any of the features we were drawing your attention to in 2013, they’ve just piously copied the concern. Hey ho!
2025 has been an odd year, especially personally, which I’ll get onto later, but business wise it has been great. Our customer list is turning into a veritable “who’s who” of international Tier 1 and 2 operators, with several turning on this year for both SMS and voice. This is predominantly for honestly-priced (no origin surcharge cons) quality termination into the UK, as well as KYC-friendly and nuisance call protected numbering. Behind them come the global hyperscalers so it is a huge and exciting step for us with many of these having been literally years in getting to this point. There’s several more in the pipeline behind them, at various stages of deployment, and we hope 2026 will add some more amazing names to the network.
This wouldn’t be possible of course without decisions made many years ago such as BTZero, which largely concluded this year with the addition of Three. Some of them, that one especially, took far too long and far too much in the way of ‘encouragement’ but we can now proudly pose the question: “Are we the most directly connected network in the UK?”. This gives our customers the highest quality, most resilient and secure path to every major network in the UK and adds tremendous value over BT and those simply reselling BT (which you could do yourself). It also gives us unrivalled economics at the per minute level which, combined with our massive internal efficiencies, means absent cross-subsidies there isn’t a deal in the UK market we cannot do better in every way than our peers.
That is good for us and the future of Simwood, where the regulatory environment requires us to grow revenue faster than minutes decline in price and value. We’re committed to doing that, and if there’s a last man standing in a decade or so, I know who it’ll be. Others, save for copying what we say, seem instead resigned to lifestyle and managed obsolescence. That is actually at every scale, from global behemoths who have voice in tickover mode, through to more local lifestyle businesses who simply spend nothing on infrastructure and rely on virtue signalling for any relevance at all. I think both approaches are wrong and in July I got to speak to Erik from Carrier Community about why voice is so critical and having a renaissance. Voice is not telephony and that epiphany is one that led us to the Potato and all the really exciting things that have come since that buy us and engaged customers a seat at the table of the future. The self-harm in telephony will no doubt accelerate (origin surcharges, anti-competitive behaviour, apathy to investment especially in security) over coming years as others ride this trend, requiring large operators to cut costs and work more efficiently, and presenting tremendous opportunity for smaller technically capable operators, amongst whom we dominate. It is a really exciting time for those with their eyes open, leveraging a network which has to be 10-15 years ahead of peers and accelerating.
This view is driving some radical changes here and causing us to do things which others find odd, and could or would never do. One example from 2025 is the crazy idea of BYoC[to the C]. Why on earth would we open our platform to numbers on other networks and leave operators paying competitors? It gives them immediate access to the value we can add without navigating protectionist and outdated porting policies and processes, which are enough to make the project fall into the ‘too hard’ bucket. Yes, they still pay a dino-carrier for value they are not adding, but the customer gets 2025 capabilities which is what matters. It has worked for us rather like a gateway-drug with large bases that otherwise would stay-put being swung over to Simwood leveraging BYoC. That’s really progress, great for the end-customer, and future-proofs our customer. The money and the billing-for-nothing it leaves behind will right itself in time one way or another
At the operator level, BYoC, can transform economics. We’re engaged with customers of all sizes who recognise they can’t compete in the future paying for SBC licenses, vmWare stacks, PBX instances etc. etc. They’re using Simwood not just to bring in calls to numbers on other networks, but rather to replace their own infrastructure with a solution which not only enhances capabilities but takes a cleaver to costs. This is for everything from inter-carrier connectivity and emergency services upwards, as far as they like towards the consumer. We’re making them more agile and modern, on a lower cost base, while Simwood is turning more into a multi-carrier hub, able to focus on getting back to building software and running as fast as we can to deliver features. Combined with our now Global Edge, these operators are global, can become more global trivially, and continue to push their own businesses forwards without the millstone of legacy.
My examples here cite major operators, and I know from conversations and initial survey responses (more on that later), that some will respond negatively to that. You really shouldn’t. We genuinely treasure customers who embrace what we do and get excited about it. One of my more exciting conversations this year was a Hosted customer building his own AI Agent from the pub on a Friday night, as soon as we gave him access through the Hosted platform. Why wouldn’t I love someone seeing the world as we do and making a difference to their customers using technology we’re excited to put out in the world? I get far quicker and more visceral feedback from this type of customer than a global behemoth who’ll want an integration guide in three years time, and that really helps us. It is part of our DNA and crucial to us doing what we do – so thank you! It is good for you too – you can move fast and light and be way ahead of the market. Look through the last decade of M&A in this sector – the sexy exits have all been (and mostly remain) customers like you, building on what Simwood does. We’re generally at least one-step removed from the end-user but there are just sooooo many opportunities for those who can build, even on what we’ve put out so far, for national and global products that can transform the lives of consumers and businesses. They will help the larger operators come to the party, add massive value short-term, and we’re right behind you.
Not everyone gets it of course. When they do, the opportunity will be historic, and there are great swathes of this market stuck in the 90s. I call many of them knuckle draggers and it is fair to say that our values don’t appeal to them. Yes, we’ll give them the best technical service in the market, but we’re not going to do things at a loss for them because they expect to mark-up every element of every component (regardless of the basket being massively cheaper) and expect the sexy stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere else thrown in for free. There are plenty of providers who choose not to invest in the future, dining out on servicing these operators, and good luck to them while it lasts. I remain increasingly concerned at the economic sustainability of this segment however, with too many mouths feeding off ever less, dirty practices, and a build-and-buy model stuck in post-2008 free-money days. More of them will fall and I don’t wish that on the flower shops, pubs, and plumbers across the nation who arguably overpay for such a vulnerable service. This is a huge opportunity, and in fact moral duty, for our agile customers who pay their bills with real money rather than running a Ponzi scheme, and offer fair value and good quality. The UK economy needs you guys and we are 100% behind you.
Technically, this year we’ve continued to push boundaries. I still maintain that our Teams Operator Connect deployment is unique, but given the productisation everywhere else it isn’t ‘seen’. It came out of beta in April with BYoC BTW. WhatsApp Calling did get noticed, because as the only carrier on the planet to integrate it (you can pay 162x as much to a CPaaS though if that floats your boat), it hasn’t yet been contaminated by knuckle draggers pitching it as the next forklift upgrade like Teams. It was August we first showed the call flow – WhatsApp consumer to Teams business – which I think is a massive use case in the CCaaS world, bringing 3bn consumers securely and verifiably into enterprises. There’s been an absolute mountain of work since, enabling us to get the product out there in beta. Some of you are doing amazing things already which is so exciting.
Conversational AI has been another one which has piqued interest. We first mic-dropped it in April, with the ability to create basic agents on Carrier Services and some of you immediately got it. We’ve extended it continuously throughout the year and Mr Duffett has made a veritable nuisance of himself using it to crack dad jokes at international conferences. While most in the space are fixated on catching the enterprise whale with an over-priced technically pretty weak product, we see this strategically as a core part of the Potato and working harmoniously with other features – we’re bringing the telephony to a space where it has been completely absent. We took something of a pause in late summer (commentary in the SimCron Podcasts), because we realised our long-term ambition of moving the lion’s share of the complex infrastructure behind these ‘on-net’ was critical to being able to reengineer core components in a Simwood way. Essentially we took a pause, built from the ground up, so we could resume going farther and faster than before. The early results are amazing and I’m pretty confident we’re going to have the best agents in the market-place for real-world applications which our customers can build on to revolutionise the market. Improvements to real-time information retrieval alone is huge (doing RAG differently to others) and makes for much richer knowledge and real-time awareness, rather than simply relying on whatever out of date training data the LLM had, plus a few scant documents. Then add in call control, which Charles will mic-drop in the next few weeks, giving attended and unattended transfer between agents and humans (i.e agent to agent, and agent to/from human), with them just sitting as an extension on your PBX and it gets really exciting. We have a tonne of ideas to add to this and can do so really fast now.
Take our telephony, Teams, WhatsApp, Conversational AI, our Global Edge, BYoC and of course our API and you have a framework in the Potato which can build new and exciting products and literally change the world, and transform your own businesses in the process. You are the key ingredient though, and we love you for it.
In other news this year we’ve spent a tonne of resources on filtering nuisance calls. Others virtue signal and discuss the problem in talking shops (that we’ve now left). But we have real data and are making real progress. We’ve taken 12 million calls off the network since June – a huge amount by any standard. These are calls in which we’ve protected your customers from, and they are calls out where we’ve protected you and downstream consumers from the consequences of harm. We remain concerned that others just want to talk, based on limited actual experience – it is like the old days of VoIP fraud – because they think talking about it shows that they care. The data shows they don’t BTW. Care is doing something about it and investing money to deprive yourself of the revenue on what’ll annualise to 25m+ calls. It has cost us customers too, both those who have blatantly lied in KYC, prompting us to call for a fit and proper persons test in telecoms, and those who are revenue driven and expect sewer-as-a-service regardless of the consequences for those who the inevitable shit lands on.
It upsets me that despite all this barely a month goes by without some rightly feral consumer in my DMs or messaging my personal phone making threats due to some nuisance handling centre somewhere saying “Simwood rang you” because we are the rangeholder. It is many many years since I had death threats as a result, or Regus Cardiff’s switchboard was swamped by the public giving us a “taste of our own medicine”, or detailed info on a charity I lead was posted on-line just because I was, in their eyes, the person responsible for harassing them. I never was, we never were, but explaining that to someone who refuses to listen and just wants blood is hard, even though I fully see where they are coming from. A big ‘unwanted calls’ button on the website (since copied everywhere) helped and indeed Pete gave it an update a decade or more later this year. I still hate that side of the industry, especially when we feel so alone in actually doing something about the problem, but it spurs us on and in doing so our terms of doing business are getting necessarily tighter. I know some of you don’t like that but I’m not going to see consumers harmed or get death threats for your profitability. We offered a webinar on Nuisance Calls, sharing the data we had. Ofcom have had it and I like to think it has changed a few things, with more to go. That webinar is still coming but to be perfectly honest we’re still learning and deploying new things, both from our data in the UK and our exposure to the far more sledgehammer approaches being adopted in the US market. There’s a link to register interest here if you haven’t already – those who are already down four times, don’t need to do it again but we love the enthusiasm and the fact you care.
Last, but by no means least, this year has given me a renewed perspective personally. I was admitted to hospital in September via A&E. More correctly, my other-half booked me for an appointment with the GP who promptly sent me directly to A&E. The triage Doctor’s words were “I don’t know what’s wrong with you but I can tell you now you’re having a blood transfusion”. As someone hitherto petrified of needles and deeply distrusting of white-coats, this was a turning point! Within minutes of a blood test all hell broke loose – I wasn’t allowed to sit down, I had to lie on a bed, and the old lady previously enjoying “Major 5” was slung out to make room for me, who’d walked in and felt fine. My haemoglobin was record-breakingly low for the consultant concerned (44 – organ damage occurs at 40 apparently and a man should be 130) and I was greeted with a parade of students given a unique opportunity to understand how the heart beats when there’s essentially nothing to pump around. It was a surreal and life-changing few days resulting in me being sent home with loads more blood (and feeling like Linford Christie), as well as a likely diagnosis and a fairly major mountain to climb. Many tests and treatments later, I’ve got the bit between my teeth with overcoming it. I feel better than ever but have not yet ‘won’. I say all that because the response to facing your own mortality is quite clarifying. It troubled me that my priorities had to become stopping my family from being homeless due to fiscal changes, that Aviva had cancelled my life insurance policies and other such trivia. My actual health took second-place to external nonsense faced with the prospect I was mortal, potentially imminently, which frankly pissed me off immensely. You can imagine my pleasure dealing with the muppets at AirWallex cutting off our cashflow for absolutely no good reason from a hospital bed, not to mention the many ways in which the so-called Government is attacking me (I own a business, employ people, am a farmer, Chair a Private School etc. etc.) and those attacks bare teeth more so when the sands-of-time change suddenly.
The flip-side of that is much more positive. I’m a fighter and, if you’ll indulge me briefly: the best person I know at solving problems. Both are in full force and I’m feeling better than ever. My prognosis is improving, I’m working full-time, and I’m hell-bent on being fully recovered in Q1 2026. Moreover, I have absolute clarity on what matters to me and a huge sense of pride in not only what we’ve built within Simwood, gratitude for those on board (past and present), and massive affection for all of those customers who have come along with us and continue to inspire and stretch us. I’m privileged to lead something globally unique, that punches well above its weight, and in the words of my hero Steve Jobs: “puts a dent in the universe”. I want to thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart for that opportunity. Add in a shot-gun wedding and my middle daughter being taken under the wings of Great Ormond Street and it has been a pretty good few months!
Running a business is about so much more than product or service though. I feel deep responsibility for ultimate end-customers, for ensuring our own customers can thrive, that our amazing staff are well rewarded and have upward mobility, before even considering what it takes to build a secure performant global platform. I love it and appreciate the opportunity you have all collectively given me to do it. However, as time goes on, one realises that it is even bigger than that as not everyone who deserves an opportunity gets it and we have a responsibility to right that too. That’s why this year, by way of a confluence of factors, we committed to supporting Challenge Aid in their Schools of Hope and ultimately the creation of the Simwood School of Hope in Nairobi. This Christmas we won’t be sending you gifts, however much we appreciate you, we won’t be sending you naf advent calendars because we feel we need to and can’t think of anything better, instead we’ll be making a difference to vulnerable lives. In addition to the ongoing support for Schools of Hope, rather a lot of chess sets are being made and will enable more young brains to develop – they’ve had 3 national chess champions already so we hope to grow that further.
It makes me realise more and more that success in life is not about ego and self-obsession – wanting the big job with the big company and the big car – it is about humility and making a difference in the world, which can often more easily come from the small company led by a founder who gets it and cares. We’re blessed to have a veritable army of those in the Simwood family.
Pulling all those random thoughts together and bringing it back to business, I’ve developed a fascination with psychology and it is helping me answer some big questions. We have competitors who cannot keep their network up for two weeks in a row, yet they survive as a business. How? We have other competitors who are 10-15 years behind, hoping to develop into things we moved on from a decade ago, yet they win business. How!? This prompted me to send the customer survey the other day. Many of you are still to respond but I’m touched by those who have. There’s clearly love for us there and several comments brought tears of joy to my eyes, but the most useful were the few haters. It is deeply insightful to see someone giving you 9/10 for reliability and all the logical things we pursue, yet being really frustrated. It is abundantly clear at this early stage that for some, technical supremacy creates lock-in, not loyalty, and an absence in the market of alternatives that offer an escape, doesn’t lead to love or appreciation on its own but rather hostility! Conversely, others can talk-the-talk, achieve little, but be adored and forgiven for what in my book is unforgivable. Humans are hard but I know what we need to do in 2026! I would dearly love to see some more responses in there to shape it further though. Please do tell me what you think – promise I’ll read them all.
Last but by no means least, I need to say thank you again. We appreciate each and every one of you (even you Ben) and wish you a fantastic Christmas, Hanukkah or whatever particular seasonal celebration you’ll be enjoying. Make the most of it and let’s kick arse together in 2026.
