I’ve followed Wadaro for 20 years, since Robert Wakeling founded the company. His mission has been constant, improving how telcos measure their customers’ experience. Their actual customers’ experience, not an estimate (drive test), wherever there’s a SIM, Wadaro can be there: eSIM, IoT, phones, cars, etc.

This means Wadaro has the most tested and most reliable in-SIM software solution on the market, both a rare skill and a rare market situation. They are unique as potential competitors have fallen away over the years. A proven, highly reliable in-SIM software is exceptionally rare.

Wadaro are deployed around the world, in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. And have broadened their platform to meet requests from telcos to meet specific problems, for example detecting SIM boxes. Using the network measurement result they also have a patented way to determine location without using GPS. All their data is geo-tagged, potentially delivering a continuously updating view of the network..

Robert quotes Peter Drucker, “you cannot manage what you cannot measure.” We also used that quote in Danial Gill’s presentation on governance and certification in SMS.

The spark that started Robert’s journey was when he reported a lack of signal at his home. The telco responded, that he does have signal (from the drive test). He discusses this in more detail on Podcast 47: TADSummit Innovators. Robert Wakeling, Wadaro.

For 40 years telcos have used drive-test, Each US telco spends roughly $200M per year on drive test. In addition to core network probing. Drive testing has the problems of being expensive, inaccurate (signal on the road only), stale (weather, population density change rapidly), and a high carbon footprint.

Using the millions to hundreds of millions of devices connected to the network enables far more accurate network monitoring. Which is up to date, far lower carbon footprint, and far more cost effective. The app can be provided on new 32kB to 128kB SIMs or OTA (Over the Air).

On the server side they have a clustered microservices based architecture. Which enables scaling for different deployments, as well as distribution for high reliability and workload distribution.

Johnny, who is Wadaro’s chief evangelist, highlighted Giesecke+Devrient, a SIM card vendor, resells Wadaro. The global savings in removing drive testing is $10B per year.

Robert reviews some of the additional problems they solve around SIM boxes and SIM swap. Interestingly, Robert claims they can potentially end SIM swap fraud, because they authenticate the user – that one is big.