46 | Unifone REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT Virginia Wright Helping rural communities stay connected Unifone has recently upgraded its rural Otago network with 60 more towers for a total of around 200 radio repeaters. Proud to support Unifone with 3D CAD design and Fabrication of their network infrastructure Unifone is proud to announce we have been appointed as an agent in Rajant Corporation’s Kinetic Mesh Partner program.We will soon be a one-stop sale and construction vendor of Rajant’s BreadCrumb® technology which has revolutionised connectivity in industry across the globe. Get in touch to find out more. Unifone specialises in commercial, industrial and critical infrastructure wireless data systems. We’re professional, approachable and have a track record of innovative and cost effective connectivity solutions for industry. Otago based Internet Service Provider (ISP) Unifone has offices in Dunedin and Balclutha but its reach spreads throughout the Otago region. Unifone is a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider), and, having been successful in their tender for some of the government’s funding for “Rural Connectivity Upgrade”, along with other large service providers, they’ve recently upgraded their network with the addition of 60 more towers for a total of around 200 radio repeaters. “Our specialty is people who can’t get internet connectivity with the big players, especially people who can’t get fibre,” says Balclutha-based director Glenn Hutton. Glenn merged his South Otago focused ISP, Rivernet, with Unifone in 2016, recognising a kindred spirit with a similar passion for what they’re doing in Dunedin-based Managing Director Travis Baird. Together, thanks to their recent expansion, and with a staff that now numbers 16, “we’ve allowed 100’s of households to join Unifone and 1000’s more are now within reach of our tower network. We want to be there as a choice, and we want to be the preferred choice, and we do that by ensuring they get the quality they pay for, with the service to back it up in terms of technical support. We’re accountable to the Crown for provision of a high-quality service and we have to provide data and statistics to prove it,” says Glenn. For residential customers of Unifone that starts with technicians coming out to install your connection for you and ensure it’s running smoothly, as Glenn explains. “We don’t just send something out in the mail for you to install yourself, and we also monitor the number of connections on our network so we can pre-empt problems by increasing capacity when needed, so that you can have peace of mind that it will do what you’re paying for it to do. We’re working really hard to provide high-speed connections, with unlimited data, at affordable prices, backed up by qualified technicians.” A core part of what they do when they’re not making sure your residential network connection is running just the way you want it to, is contracting out to other businesses for which a fast and reliable internet service is an essential part of what they do. They work closely to understand the specific needs of each business and come up with a suitable internet system to meet those needs. Alongside those services as an ISP they make further good use of their tower network, specialized tools, materials and skill base for customers such as Critical Infrastructure Providers: ports, telecommunications companies, or power companies, to name a few. “We provide specialised data radio connectivity for infrastructure companies across our region. We work with them to support their internal data networks and it’s somewhere that we can offer real value because we have expert technicians at the ISP level to provide the services they need,” says Glenn. Radio communication has been around for hundreds of years. Today this old school technology is put to modern use by companies with large numbers of employees needing to exchange data who may be spread from one end of a Port to another, or spread across Otago. It offers a viable, affordable, alternative to extensive fibre-optic cabling, using radio technology such as that used throughout their own network by Unifone. “Properly configured and set up it’s capable of reliably putting large amounts of data through and we put a lot of work in to make sure that happens. “It’s a specialty of our company to stay abreast of developments in that space,’ says Glenn.
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