• Unwanted sales calls and spam texts
• Abandoned and silent calls

The letter is attached for you to read and to ensure compliance with. However, as the Network Operator potentially carrying your traffic we wanted to highlight a few areas of observation and discuss some of the measures we take before they impact you.

A critical aspect of this is latency and we explained how the major determinant of download speed is latency rather than bandwidth. We analogised bandwidth with lanes on a motorway and latency as distance: when you only have one car the number of lanes doesn’t matter, it is how far you need to go that affects how long it’ll take to get there.

This topic more recently came up on our VUC interview with the specific example of a user with a high bandwidth line but unable to achieve any more than about 5Mbps of download speed.

Whilst we’d recommend re-reading our article or listening to the VUC to understand this more fully, we’ve just come across an old paper put out by Google showing the relationship between bandwidth, latency and experienced performance. The conclusion is the same but they experiment by varying the elements and graphing the result. For those who’d like to put numbers to the theory, this is well worth a read.

• - Williams House
• - Kilburn House
• - Synergy House
• - Reynolds House

This may be of interest to customers requiring:

• - stable layer2 between Manchester data-centres - a rarity historically
• - stable layer2 between Manchester and other data-centres on the Simwood network
• - access to Simwood Transit (full, partial or TiNet) from other Manchester data centres
• - access to a VPLS on the Simwood network
• - a private peering session with Simwood in Manchester

Please let us know if you have a requirement that we can help with.

To listen to a recording of the broadcast please click on the player below:

Download: Simwood on VUC
Listen:

There are several links referred to in the recording which are below:

• - Our API docs
• - RIPE stats to identify the network an IP address is actually on
• - How/why TCP tolerates congestion and why latency is the ultimate limiter of performance
• - Simwood document about VoIP QoS over the public Internet
• - Our termination rates
• - Features of our new SIP stack

If you use Simwood for voice in or out you will have a stable IP path to us because we always proxy the media. We control that path and as we probably peer with your ISP or co-lo provider it will usually be direct and plentiful.

Even if you do not use Simwood for voice we believe we are ‘the’ network for voice business. Other voice wholesalers with networks (many simply use commodity co-location whatever their website may claim) have become distracted with the allure of commodity Internet access or built their network only as necessary. Simwood is quite unique in scaling the network out specifically for voice business. Co-locating with us or using us for connectivity should lead to shorter, more stable paths to both your customers and your suppliers, over a network built for voice. Further, unlike most IP Transit offerings we will prioritise your voice and recognise your QoS markings to ensure it takes precedence over other incidental traffic you may pass.

Whilst we have 4 sites we strongly recommend Equinix Slough. International customers can consider it London West as it is under 1ms from our Telehouse site in London East. However, it is 27 miles away and just outside the M25 which is considered the boundary to London, i.e. far enough away from likely terrorist targets or inner city disruption. It is independently connected to both Telehouse and up to our Manchester site as well as directly to Level 3. One of our BT interconnects enters there as well.

All our racks there enjoy optional dual A-B power feeds of up to 26A each (i.e. 52A per rack) and we aim to make you as independent as possible by deploying racks with lockable quarters (you can have independent unescorted access without risk to other customers) and IP switchable PDUs (you can control your own power cycles). Space is available in quarter, half and full-racks.

Every rack connects back to our core with multi-tenant racks enjoying a 10Gb connection to a dedicated Brocade top-of-rack switch. Customers may take fibre or copper in 100Mb to 10Gb port size for IP Transit and/or ethernet connectivity to any other site, including out to your customer offices using our Carrier Ethernet product.

Further, whilst some virtualisation providers crow about unifying ‘the cloud’ and traditional co-lo, we have always done it that way. If you co-locate with us you’ll have a VLAN present in any rack and any virtualised servers on the same site. You can mix physical and virtual completely transparently at no extra cost. That VLAN can be extended inter-site using our VPLS product.

We do not offer commodity connectivity or commodity hosting as we remain very focussed on voice. If you are looking for a home for your voice equipment and services on the only network built and kept especially for voice business please get in touch.

QoS, or Quality of Service, is a term used in VoIP circles but often misunderstood and as a consequence rarely implemented, despite the best of intentions. Depending on the network(s) involved in handling your VoIP traffic and in particular the RTP audio element of calls it can make the difference between a better-than-PSTN experience and VoIP being unusable.

In this guide we attempt to clarify some misunderstanding in technically minimal terms and give you a practical guide to ensure you are doing what you can to implement QoS, or at least understanding where your efforts are fruitless and why. We concern ourselves with SIP and RTP here rather than other flavours of VoIP but the principles are fundamentally the same.

We conclude with an Action Plan to give you end-to-end QoS by configuring the elements you control and shining a light on those you can’t. If you’re serious about quality you will know what to look for in replacing the elements you can’t control to optimise the experience for your customers.

Read the full white-paper 

2013 is going to be a great year.

I hope you enjoyed the break although I know many of you have been using the down-time to do some really cool things with our API and new SIP features. I wanted to briefly remind you of some of the things we mailed you about in December as they may have got lost amongst a plethora of e-cards (I had 11 from the same company)!

Reduced DDI rates

We announced we were lowering our DDI and ported number charges effective January 1st. Invoices have now gone out and many customers will have seen a reduction.

Numbering is available nation-wide with vanity/gold numbers available in every area and instant provisioning through our API.

If there’s any reason we’re not your first choice for wholesale UK numbering we’d be interested to hear it.

New SIP stack

We also sent some private invites to try our new termination infrastructure. Feedback has been encouraging and if you haven’t tried it, we’d love you to. Just fill in details here. We’re asking which areas your interested in mostly so we can give you specific information in return but it is also nice to know which features have struck most of a chord with customers.

2012 review

We recapped on some of the developments in 2012 in our Christmas mail. If you missed it, it is available online.

***

We’ve some really exciting things planned for this year which I can’t wait to tell you about. Rest assured we remain focussed on IP voice and associated infrastructure but there is so much more to be done in this space.

Once again, I hope 2013 is all you wish for and look forward to working with you.

All the best,
Simon Woodhead

PS – we recently put up a company Linked In page but feel a bit lonely! We’d love it if you followed us!

As you may know, we own our own business logic and enjoy immense agility through the use of Open Source software solutions. However, there are certain things that are just better done in hardware, taking advantage of silicon specifically designed for purpose. Our network runs entirely on Brocade for example with all routing in hardware and similarly our SS7 interconnects run on Dialogic with hardware based DSPs. Hardware gives predictable performance and rock-solid stability in a physically dense way; software gives flexibility and dynamism. This update is a top-to-bottom rebuild which takes the best elements of open-source software agility and fuses them together with hardware based stability and performance, with our own application layer providing the glue in between.

We’re very excited to share this with you and really look forward to you trying it.

Key features are outlined below. For further information please click through.

We really hope you like the new features and look forward to your feedback. The new stack is defined as a ‘beta’ but should be stable to include in production routing with our production set-up as a backup. Areas considered ‘beta’ are the new features which may not work as expected.

If you would like to try the new stack, please request interop information. Naturally, if you do not yet have an account you will need to open a test account before being able to participate in the beta.

It’s the time of year to say a big ‘thank you’ for your support over the last 12 months. We really appreciate your interest and business and you’ve made 2012 a record year for us.

This year saw the conclusion of the network upgrade we began in 2011, migrating our entire network to a Brocade stack with MPLS in the core around every site. We now have a new site in Slough which is rapidly gaining importance within the network as the perfect compromise of proximity to our Telehouse location (< 1ms) but being outside the M25 – 27 miles away from Telehouse.

In February we released version 3 of our API and from your feedback you love it. With similar features released since by competitors and some openly admitting to copying it, it is in danger of becoming an industry standard! We hope so actually as features such as our fraud protection remain unique but would really benefit all.

We’ve also been quietly working away on the legacy SS7 side of things. We’ll talk more about this in Q2 2013 when the Slough BT interconnect is complete but there’s some exciting things to tell you there. For now, the London end is carrying a heavy proportion of traffic to/from BT on shiny new Dialogic hardware.

We wrote a few days ago about our new stack, inviting you to try it. We’re pleased to say it is already busy with a reasonable level of traffic and doing well. Let us know if you want to try it over the holiday!!

One thing we forgot to mention was the addition of 1m or so new number ranges to the Simwood platform. We will be multiplying that early next year with ranges hosted for other providers.

Meanwhile we’ve built solutions and shaped strategy for some of the worlds leading telcos, ranging from mobile VoIP infrastructure to the conversion of legacy SS7 to SIP. We also now have a number of incumbents as customers of our core voice services.

Of course, one of the biggest changes this year was the appointment of Tjardick van der Kraan as Director and Grahame Davies to our Advisory Board. I’d like to take opportunity to thank them both and hope you’re feeling the benefit of their input.

We apparently also turned 15 and didn’t notice!

We’ve some really exciting things planned for 2013 which I can’t wait to tell you about. Rest assured we remain focussed on IP voice and associated infrastructure but there is so much more to be done in this space.

Once again, have a wonderful holiday and we look forward to working with you next year.

All the best,
Simon and team

PS – we’ll be responding to support tickets as normal outside of the public holidays. During those times we will of course be monitoring the network and dealing with any priority tickets.

PPS – we recently put up a company Linked In page but feel a bit lonely! We’d love it if you followed us!