SYDNEY (WiMAX Day). Unwired Australia has had impressive performance this year. In its Q2 financial report, Unwired management discussed its results with superlative adjectives such as “saved,” “transformed,” and “improved,” leading one to wonder exactly what consultants had been tweaking the Unwired business.Last year, Unwired was faced with the most common of all growing pains of a young company, ie how to manage growth. Operating costs at the four-year-old company were rising, and customer care time had increased.

In such a situation, most companies would have called in the management consultants. Instead, Unwired decided to fix the problem itself. “We had very well-defined processes,” says Unwired CEO David Spence, “but we weren’t linking all of them into the network. We had no ‘internal’ visibility.”

Unwired needed a software platform that could integrate its network functions with all business processes. No off-the-shelf software package could be found to deliver the solutions required by Unwired. Instead the company began to develop its own platform to optimise its network performance. The result was uboWireless.

Business transformation
Since its implementation, uboWireless has brought Unwired a direct capital savings of over AUD$7 million, and a reduction of operating expenditure by $600,000. This was achieved through operational improvements that analysed customer churn rates, and customer call handling which derived an improvement of 40% with the new software.

The improvements in customer service have been significant. The uboWireless platform allows Unwired to troubleshoot any customer problems in real-time, and helps to identify any performance issues. Customer service personnel are able to investigate historical performance of a customer, track connection statistics and optimise connectivity.

The system also has had a significant impact on network planning. It allows Unwired to add capacity to the network when and where it is needed. It has the ability to effectively balance traffic load, and manage base station performance using parameters that are set to meet the needs of customers.

uboWireless has been so successful for Unwired that it is now available for wireless network operators to use as an ASP service. It is marketed worldwide from headquarters in Sydney, Australia, and the service is also available for operators using Navini equipment. uboWireless said they are in discussion with a number of other equipment manufacturers with plans to develop a fully WiMAX-compliant service shortly.

For Unwired Australia, uboWireless has proven to be a key factor in their successful growth.