I’ve always sought to create a disruption to an existing industry and in 2010 I hoped to do this by creating a general purpose Mobile Virtual Network Enablement (MVNE) service which could bring mobile telecoms into the hands of SMEs who had 50 subscribers or more.

The ultimate aim was that SMS and Voice traffic was seamless between fixed lines and mobile users in a given organisation – what is now commonly referred to as fixed-mobile convergence. I believed that many SMEs had the ability and desire to handle their own Mobile Originating (MO) and Mobile Terminating (MT) SMS, and to present this to them as an option – as well as the voice component – was a strong value proposition which would justify the R&D time required to bring MVNO to SMEs.

Here’s an early overview of how voice and SMS traffic were to be segmented when using the OpenMobile product in an organisation:

The lynchpin of this proposition was originally an H3G MVNO brokered beautifully by AQL but this project was stopped as the high cost of data throughput meant that it was not possible to bring the service to a B2B market.

I then worked with the UK Telecommunications Regulator, Ofcom, and obtained a new mobile range (100,000 numbers) for the purpose of providing OTT services across a wide range of multi-network International Mobile Subscriber Identities (IMSIs) so that the underlying carrier was no longer critical to providing the service. I engaged with Manx Telecom to provide USIMs with IMSIs from multiple Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and rolled out the service to early-adopter Netfuse customers.