Two places we go deeper than a general engineering firm.
Value-added services on mobile operator networks, and connected devices at estate scale. Both take years to learn and neither can be picked up from documentation.
We have run services that bill through the operator.
Over several years we designed, launched and operated subscription services with mobile network operators across African and Middle Eastern markets — services the subscriber signs up to on their handset and pays for on their phone bill.
Services we have taken live
- Video on demand — catalogue delivery tuned to the bandwidth actually available
- Music on demand — streaming and download, with licensing and reporting behind it
- Books and audio content — subscription libraries on constrained handsets
- Live sports scores — real-time results with African mobile operators
- Safety and emergency alerting — fire and hazard warning services with Middle Eastern operators
We describe these by region and service type. Operators and countries are named only where we hold written permission — which is also how we will treat your name.
The part that is actually difficult
Building the service is the small half. What separates a VAS that earns from one that is quietly switched off after two quarters:
- Operator commercial models and how revenue share is really settled
- The subscription lifecycle — opt-in, consent, renewal, grace, churn — and the regulation around each step
- Hard and soft bundling, and where a service sits in the operator’s own promotion calendar
- Content licensing and territory rights
- Designing for 2G feature phones and 4G smartphones from the same platform
- Reporting an operator’s finance team will accept without argument
How an operator-billed service is put together
Devices are easy to demonstrate and hard to keep running.
A connected product is straightforward with one unit on a desk. The engineering begins at a hundred units in places you cannot visit, on connections you do not control, with firmware that has to be updated without anyone driving to site.
We work across both ends of that: the device and gateway architecture, and the platform that has to keep an estate healthy.
- Device and gateway architecture — what runs locally, what goes to the platform, what happens when the link drops
- Cellular connectivity and APN management — provisioning, data plans, and the operator side of a fleet
- Fleet provisioning and lifecycle — onboarding, configuration, firmware and retirement at scale
- Telemetry pipelines — ingest, storage and alerting that stays affordable as the fleet grows
- Managed estates — screens and sensors across many sites, monitored centrally, fixed before the client notices
Two of the products on our work page are IoT estates in daily commercial use, which is a more useful reference than a specification sheet.
Gateways, SIMs and enclosures. The part of IoT that decides whether the rest works.
The theory is real, and it stays in its place.
Our managing director holds a doctorate in computer engineering and keeps an active research interest in Industry 4.0 and 5.0, digital twins and AI governance. It informs how we think about connected systems, and we are glad to discuss it with an institutional partner.
On a client engagement, it stays in the background. You are buying a product that works, not a research programme.
If you are an operator, an aggregator, or running an estate of connected devices, the first conversation is usually short. We will know quickly whether we can help.