Unwired's network optimisation technology wins award

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 22 September 2009 17:18

IT Industry - Strategy

Unwired subsidiary ubowireless has taken out the top award at the Engineers Australia (Sydney Division) excellence awards but Unwired's hopes to commercialise the technology appear to have come to nought.

The ubowireless suite, a set of tools developed by Unwired that collects data across the operations of a wireless network and implements real time optimisation won the top award in the control systems and communications category, was highly commended in the innovation and inventions category and went on to win the Bradfield Award, which is presented to and overall winner selected from the winners of all categories.

According to Phil Ridley, ubowireless CTO, "The ubowireless suite can look at what the customer is experiencing and realise that they would get a better service from another base station and switch them to that.''

Unwired CEO, David Spence said the ubowireless technology had been critical for Unwired's network and had been adapted for use with the mobile WiMAX technology that Unwired will be rolling out for the Vividwireless service in Perth.

However he made no comment on the aspirations Unwired had held back in 2007 when Unwired set up a company, also named ubowireless, to commercialise the technology. At that time he said "We have trialled ubowireless with an overseas wireless network provider and established that there is a market for this product worldwide. To explore and develop this opportunity we have used a commercial ready grant from AusIndustry, together with funding from Unwired."

He was not willing at the time to put any numbers or timeframe on this business, saying: "ubowireless is something of an unknown quantity for Unwired and due to the long sales cycles, we can give no predictions of future income streams. We are however, optimistic about the future of this exciting technology."