Straight-talking, in writing

The Simwood blog.

Telecoms, AI in the call path, network engineering and the occasional strong opinion. Several times a week since 2009.

Portal login, upgraded

Portal login is moving to a new identity platform, and if it goes to plan you won't notice a thing. Same email and password, same 2FA, just a new add…

A million scam calls a month never happen

Regular readers will know we take spam and scam calls, aka nuisance calls, very seriously. Every one is potentially a granny robbed of her life savin…

AI is an extinction-level event.

AI is an extinction-level event. Just not for the people you think.

The Slough incident that nearly was

At 14:27 on July 13th 2026 a host in Slough died the way hardware does: no warning, no way back. For once, the architecture built to shrug this off d…

Internal documentation that actually gets used: ADRs, MCP servers, and AI-accessible knowledge

Part 12 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 There’s a category of engineering problem that doesn’t show up in postmortem…

Documentation as a first-class product: narrative guides, live OpenAPI, and Scalar

Part 11 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 Most API documentation in telecoms is a reference dump. A list of endpoints.…

Deprecation as a feature: how we migrate a 200-endpoint API without breaking customers

Part 10 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 “We’re retiring this endpoint” is a statement that has earned its bad reputa…

Authentication done right: API keys, OIDC, and the end of Basic Auth

Part 9 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 Authentication is one of those things where the gap between “works” and “done…

A new API architecture: independent services, one gateway, zero coupling

Part 8 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 The Conversation Intelligence platform didn’t get built on top of our existin…

Conversation Memory and vCon: the intelligence that compounds over time

Part 7 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 Per-call analysis is useful. Intelligence that compounds across calls is tran…

Operators: turning a call into structured signals your systems can act on

Part 6 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 The media tap described in Part 5 gives you the audio. Transcription gives yo…

Real-time intelligence at the carrier layer: how the media tap works

Part 5 of 12 – Conversation Intelligence Platform series Back to Part 1 The “carrier advantage” described in Part 4 is not a marketing claim. It has…