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.

You buy from who!?

Partnering beats building everything yourself. That leaves the question of who. Two tests: do they have what you need already built, and does their g…

The Ministry of Messages

Orwell gave us the vocabulary. Kafka drew the floor plan. On 15 July, Ofcom published the regulations. Here is the short version, for the busy. Your…

Stop Building Everything Yourself: Why the Fastest Route to Innovation is Often Partnership

In every conversation I have with UCaaS providers, one theme keeps emerging. There is an understandable desire to build. Build the new voice capabili…

Dialable, but not accountable

We have spent the better part of a decade going on about caller ID. Sending valid CLI, blocking the invalid stuff, dipping numbers to check they are…

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…