Hi. I’m David. I look after infrastructure and systems at Simwood. While I haven’t worked directly with many of you, I work closely every day with the support team you’ll know, and I’m one of the first points of escalation from Jakob and Fred in Level 3.
My journey into telecoms started towards the end of my IT apprenticeship. My last project there was deploying a phone system for the business. Nobody else had experience with PBXs, but I had recently picked up a copy of Asterisk: The Definitive Guide. Armed with little more than some networking and Linux experience, I was given free rein to make it happen. At the time, it was a challenge, but it sparked a curiosity that eventually turned into a career.
The following year, at 19, I joined Sipcentric, which felt like the platform I wish I’d had when I was building that PBX. The company itself was still only a couple of years old, and I became its second employee, working directly with the founder, Charles, now Simwood’s CTO, from day one.
It was a true start-up environment. There was no safety net, and no job description beyond figuring it out and making it work. You had to stand behind your decisions, because there was nobody else to blame. I helped expand the network into two additional sites, spent a lot of time on the phone supporting customers, some of whom still ask for me today, and learned to code along the way. That included building an early Chrome extension for click-to-dial and CRM notifications, something I am not sure I would want anyone reviewing too closely today.
As the company grew, so did the platform. We scaled from a small operation into a multi-site, multi-homed network with our first IP allocations from RIPE, and we eventually brought in dedicated developers as the technical complexity increased. Despite that growth, we never lost the fun. Nerf guns were scattered around the office, and somehow we still had time to make up over-the-top promo videos for spoof features. One of these was a “zombie outbreak panic button”. For reasons still unclear, I played “James” in it, which may well have been the least questionable decision of the whole thing.
In 2019, Sipcentric was acquired by Simwood, and that transition opened up a huge amount of opportunity. What I enjoy most about the role today is its variety. On any given week, I might be working on the network at one of our eight sites, helping the support team with a complex customer issue, or collaborating with developers on a deployment or new feature. It means I still get to play a direct role in solving customer problems, but now alongside a depth of expertise that constantly pushes standards higher. Joining Simwood also meant learning a great deal from people who have been operating networks at scale for a long time.
One of the things that really stands out at Simwood is the level of ownership. This is not a place where you wait to be told what to do. If you see a problem, you are expected to take responsibility for it, and that ownership is genuinely recognised. That culture is reinforced by an open-door approach from senior management and the board, where difficult conversations are welcomed rather than avoided. It creates an environment where problems are tackled head-on, ideas from all sides can be challenged constructively, and people with different backgrounds and perspectives are valued for what they bring. You’ll see the same spirit reflected throughout our blogs.
Looking ahead, the challenges facing our industry are as interesting as they are demanding. Optimising deployments is no longer just about performance or resilience, but also efficiency, as the costs of hardware, rack space, and energy continue to rise. At the same time, the ongoing threat of cyber attacks and large-scale DDoS events means we must constantly evolve our tooling and our thinking. These are the kinds of challenges Simwood has long taken seriously, often much earlier than the rest of the industry, and they are a big part of what makes the work engaging.
Outside of work, I tend to spend my time on more hands-on pursuits: renovating my 120-year-old house, shooting and developing 35mm film, and building guitar effect pedals. My current interest is germanium fuzz circuits, and I like that they trace back to the early Bell Labs transistor work that helped move telecoms beyond vacuum tubes.
I’ve remained with Simwood since the Sipcentric acquisition not out of habit, but because the mix of ownership, technical depth, openness, and variety of work is rare. Simwood is genuinely a unique place to work.
