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.

BT’s 999 outage

I was at an event in Malaysia last week and was, frankly, ashamed to be British. The UK was singled out for so many failings and being on a fast trac…

Changes to UK Mobile billing

In January 2023, we changed how we presented UK Mobile breakouts on our rate sheets so our depth of interconnectedness was more clear. We essentially…

Hosted going global

We’ve been pretty critical of Carrier Services competitors claiming to ‘get global’, due to casual approaches to regulation, outright deception or de…

The Rise of the Robots

We mentioned recently our work with porting automation and our aims there. We took a big step last week which I wanted to update you on. It is import…

Hi, I’m Fred!

Hi, It’s me Fred My name is Fred Muteesa, I am a husband and a father of 4. I am originally from Uganda but currently based in the UK (more on this l…

Resilience is not a magic button

I’m afraid this post might be a bit ranty. Regular readers will know they sometimes are (some love it, some hate it – that’s how principles go) and I…

Teams in Beta on Hosted

You may recall our announcement “Free Teams Comes to Hosted” where we said it’d be dropping in early Q3. So here we are and delighted to announce tha…

Come Visit Us in Nairobi!

We are thrilled to be attending ITW Africa 2024 in Kenya from September 10-12th at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Nairobi Upper Hill. If you’re an internati…

Dramatic change to our position on Origin Surcharges

Carrier Services customers will recently have received a survey from us which made it pretty clear we were reconsidering our position on origin surch…

Something big is coming to porting!

Heads-up – something big is about to change in porting, and I don’t mean One Touch Switch. For us, porting has always been a loss leader. It is a rid…

Dirty CPI-Linked Retail Contracts

By now, you’ll have seen that Ofcom have banned inflation-linked prices rises during the contract term for “customers.” Ofcom’s PR machine deliberate…

Jakob, Support Team Leader, talks Potatoes

Hi All, I don’t think an introduction is needed here as I’m sure I have spoken to you, but for those who don’t know, I’m Jakob, a Level 3 Support Eng…