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.

Important: Please update your VAT details

Further to our recent note about HMRC’s changed VAT rules for wholesale telecommunications, we need to ask all customers to update their VAT informat…

UK VAT changes

HMRC announced significant changes to VAT on January 15th that take effect on February 1st and have quite a pronounced effect on the way we bill you,…

Important: Mandatory Caller ID

We’ve blogged before about the importance of sending valid caller ID on all calls, and warned that we will begin rejecting call attempts with invalid…

Use it or lose it! Why we won’t give you unlimited channels

In an IP world the idea of ‘channels’ seems a bit old fashioned, and whilst many providing hosted PBX etc. like to sell per channel, the suggestion o…

IP Transit Changes

It is important we continue to develop our IP network to ensure maximum stability and performance for customers. As we mentioned in “Surviving Someon…

Farewell Dan

By Simon Woodhead I just wanted to let customers know that Dan Lane will be leaving the business on January 31st. Dan has been with us for just over…

VoIP Fraud Analysis 2016

We’re delighted to release the 2016 version of our VoIP Fraud Analysis report. This updates the 2014 version with an additional 2 years of data and m…

Are you relying on fail2ban to secure your Asterisk?

Let’s be clear, we love Asterisk. If someone wants an easy to configure PBX, we send them that way, and indeed our own new non-technical staff have t…

Thanks for a great year!

By Simon Woodhead As we near Christmas I wanted to take time to say a huge thank you to all our customers and wish you and your families the very bes…

How to build a mobile service – Part One: R&D

Hardly a day goes by without a call from someone interested in building a new mobile service who is looking for some advice on how to get started; wh…

Which one number do 95% of VoIP attackers dial?

It is some time since we published our VoIP Fraud Analysis in 2013 so an update is overdue (and coming). In there we introduced the notion of “test n…

Christmas hours

Given many other operators are closing their porting desks over the Festive Season, we will not be processing porting orders during the period from D…