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.

Prepayment by card

By popular demand customers are now able to top-up prepayment accounts in real-time using Visa, MasterCard or American Express. We still prefer payme…

Lies, damn lies and networks

There are some in this industry with an inclination to exaggerate or lie. ‘Lie’ is a harsh word though so let’s call it ‘marketing fluff’ from here o…

Payment process changes – Important

We have introduced changes to the way we bill and take payment of invoices. Consolidated invoices Previously most services were billed at the beginni…

OFCOM presses ahead regardless

OFCOM, the body in the UK responsible for promoting competition, has spent 18 months consulting with stakeholders over its plans to impose controls o…

Protecting you from VoIP fraud

We recently had a support ticket which asked what we did to cap losses resulting from fraud. Figuring that everyone followed the continuing drip-feed…

A sneak preview and a chance to win some free call credit

We’d like to give you a sneak preview of our new website. It isn’t finished, content is changing and some features are disabled until launch but we w…

Our response to the Culture, Media & Sport Committee inquiry into Nuisance Calls

The Culture, Media & Sport Committee is holding an inquiry into nuisance telephone calls and text messages, focusing on the current regulatory system…

Massive storage upgrades to our vSphere environments

In short If you don’t wish to read the whole story the takeaway is that we’re replacing our general purpose vSphere storage with two tiers. New Tier…

Changes in FreePhone

There’s a few things happening to UK FreePhone (0800, 0808 and 0500 numbers) that you need to be aware of and potentially plan for. BT PayPhone Acces…

New Customer API Features

We’re pleased to announce the latest incremental upgrade to our market-leading Customer API which adds a range of useful new tools including; Trunk M…

Real-time big-data!

‘Big data’ is a bit of a buzz phrase lately and is typically used to refer to large volumes of data, crunched over prolonged periods to determine lon…

Advanced Call Cost Control

Uniquely we allow our customers to leverage our own call control platform to set their own limits on a per trunk, and per class of destination, basis…