I’m delighted to report that over the past several months we’ve significantly expanded our engineering and project delivery teams. An obvious driver for this is our growing pipeline of large-scale, exciting and resource-heavy indoor network projects but there’s more to it than that.
Our indoor networks business is about designing, building and managing high-quality, sustainable wireless infrastructure to enable the digital transformation of businesses and commercial and operational real estate to the benefit of building owners, visitors and tenants. But what does that actually mean in practice?
First, it means we have built up unique real-world experience and strong partnerships through the successful delivery of public cellular and private networks within the retail, entertainment, travel and enterprise sectors. It also means we have design and engineering skills that can adapt to a broad range of specific use case requirements – for example, designing networks to address the specific needs of shopping centres, sports stadiums, airports and more.
But this focus on partnership is not just about our relationships with operators, retailers, building owners and their customers. Our unique way of working means that, whenever possible, we always aim to include all key stakeholders in our network design and delivery processes. This could mean involving building architects, M&E consultants, anchor tenants, facilities management providers and even the emergency services.
The more aspects of a deployment we know about in advance, such as tenant occupancy dates, retail store fit-outs, stadium fixture lists and peak footfall schedules, the better chance we have of avoiding unexpected surprises. Everything we do is about delivering on time and to budget – the highest possible standards and our processes have been developed to support this.
All our hard-won, frontline experience has gone into the development of our design and delivery guidelines – a unique and evolving playbook gleaned from more than a decade of pioneering indoor networks and infrastructure-as-a-service in the UK.
Our experienced engineering and project delivery teams make this happen on a daily basis.
Our engineering team’s responsibility is to architect and design the network solutions we deploy. They do this through extensive data gathering exercises and key stakeholder engagement for each new network we deploy. This data is used alongside industry-leading modelling software to develop a detailed design which complies fully with the high standards set within our Design Guidelines and also with MNO expectations and the JOTS standard in the UK.
Our project delivery team uses the detailed design to procure the materials and resources required to complete network build, converting them into physical networks which support the infrastructure and mobile service needs of our clients well into the future.
Our job doesn’t end there of course.
We also monitor all our networks pro-actively on a 24-hour basis. This allows our operations team to identify many potential issues before they happen and fix them remotely – before they affect our clients. This maintains continuity of service to end users, reducing truck rolls and improving the sustainability of networks, a particular area of focus for WIG.
We operate the largest and most diverse portfolio of public cellular and private network deployments of any infrastructure-as-a-service provider in the country. And this has given us the experience, the understanding and the modelling tools that enable us to innovate, architect, design and build the most efficient and sustainable networks for each individual environment.
As may by now be clear, nothing we do is one-size-fits-all. But the end result should always be that we deliver a network and services that fully satisfies the requirements of our clients and their end-user customers.
So yes, we’ve grown the team recently because of our scale and the exciting projects we continue to deliver. But we’re also expanding because we will never compromise on quality and will continue to invest in attracting the best talent within our industry so that each of our clients receive the best quality of service from our networks and our team.
And we like to think this attention to detail is paying off. Interest and investment in the public and private networks we deliver is growing fast and, understandably, so is demand for our skills. Recruiting the right people to meet that demand is an ongoing priority these days – and a very welcome one.
