The Simwood Potato®

Strip the metaphor

What it actually is.

The potato is the network: wholly owned, three UK availability zones plus a Global Edge on four continents, full mesh, latency-routed, no single point of failure. Around it sit the services - fraud and nuisance blocking, recording and transcription, Conversational AI, Conversation Intelligence - like layers of foil wrapped around a baked potato. And through the whole thing run the skewers: the transports. SIP, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp Calling, the PSTN, BYoC from another carrier. Every skewer passes through every layer of foil and through the potato itself, which is the entire point: any to any. A call can arrive on any transport and leave on any other, with any service applied on the way through. And because the edge is global, it's also anywhere to anywhere. The potato approximates Earth: every transport is available at every edge, so a call can enter on WhatsApp in Mumbai and leave on Teams in London, or come and go without ever leaving town. Simple termination today, Conversation Intelligence tomorrow, no re-plumbing in between.

The foil, unrolledFor the procurement deck, the layers have proper names: an infrastructure layer (Tier-1 UK carrier services, direct PSTN interconnect, numbering, origination and termination), a communications platform layer (programmable voice, provisioning, messaging, routing and orchestration), a customer engagement layer (voice, SMS, WhatsApp Business, notifications) and an intelligence layer (Conversational AI, Operators, intelligent routing). Most providers compete in one layer. The Potato is all four, integrated.

Global EdgeEntry points in London, Virginia, São Paulo, Cape Town, Mumbai and Sydney. Calls join the Potato near where they happen, not where we happen to be - anywhere to anywhere.

Availability zonesThree in the UK, each able to provide full service on its own, with dozens of instances of every micro-service - plus the Global Edge beyond them. We can recreate the entire stack in a new zone in about 30 minutes.

SurvivabilitySpecified to lose both US zones and two of three UK zones and still carry the entire network load. When both paths of our London fibre ring were cut simultaneously in 2024, we still had two left and customers noticed nothing. Exactly as designed.

DirectnessDirect interconnects with all four UK mobile networks and the major fixed operators; most UK calls route end to end with no intermediaries. We have a pathological hatred of congestion.

EngineeringAn N+4 core, containerised since 2015, no virtualisation, anycast inside the network for load balancing, service discovery and fault tolerance. No maintenance windows, because nothing needs one.

Proof100% SLA with 25x credits. Last outage 2018. Ten years of public incident history at status.simwood.com.

FAQ

Questions, answered.

What is the Simwood Potato®?

The Potato is Simwood's network core: one dynamic, programmable core that everything plugs into and everything runs inside. It's the architecture every service on the site runs on.

Why is it called the Potato?

Every carrier draws their network as a cloud. Simwood's grew into something more organic - one programmable core - and the shape, and the name, stuck.

What runs on the Potato?

Every Simwood service - carrier, Hosted, Conversational AI, Conversation Intelligence and call recording - on the same core, same API and same intelligence, whichever transport you connect over: SIP, Teams, WhatsApp, BYoC or the PSTN.

Yes, we called it a Potato.

What it actually is.

Questions, answered.

One core. Every door. Your call.