New Perth telco wins top backing

Nedlands-based tech company Norwood Systems has enlisted two influential supporters to launch a platform which it says will cut exorbitant mobile roaming costs for corporate clients.

Norwood has developed a cloud services platform to reduce global roaming expenses incurred by mobile phone users overseas.

Chief executive Paul Ostergaard said the system did not require a change in client behaviour.

"We seamlessly utilise their existing systems to route company calls over both the company's own network and our cloud based network," Mr Ostergaard said.

Large firms with many employees travelling overseas could run up monthly bills into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.

Mr Ostergaard said the technology preserved call quality and employees would not have to use calling cards, or different handsets or SIM cards.

Despite a rapid increase in data use for tablets and smart phones, businesses around the world generate $US30 billion ($A33.8 billion) in voice roaming charges, far exceeding business data roaming charges of $US7 billion to $US10 billion.

Broadband provider iiNet had signed up for the platform service, Norwood said.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who recently ran up a high overseas mobile bill, officially launched the platform in Perth on Friday alongside Norwood director and Azure Capital founder John Poynton.

Mr Ostergaard said the platform was originally launched last July "under stealth mode" and was conceived as a pure office-to-office mobility service.

As a result of consultation with clients both signed and prospective, Norwood's original concept was broadened to become a market first in corporate roaming service for fixed and private networks, providing an alternative to expensive mobile phone roaming.

Ms Bishop, who has previously spoken out about exorbitant roaming costs, said she had spoken with Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and he has since written a letter to Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

The letter requests the government to introduce legislation into parliament which would give the ACCC new powers to keep pressure on Australian mobile carriers to lower their roaming rates.

Ms Bishop said she was looking forward to the planned expansion of the current network of 12 global nodes - which are used in automatically rerouting phone calls at a discounted rate - to include nodes that would cover Papua New Guinea and the area directly north of Australia.

Mr Ostergaard said Norwood would eventually build up to 100 nodes across the world, and had started in areas its clients spent the most time and money currently on international roaming.

With help from seed investor Mr Poynton, Mr Ostergaard said Norwood had already met with senior executives of several large banks and engineering firms who had all expressed interest in becoming clients.

"Everyone's been stung by high roaming fees. There isn't a single person who hasn't," Mr Ostergaard said.

He said Australia's mobile carriers had some of the highest fees for international roaming, along with carriers in Chile and South Africa.

Mr Ostergaard explored a similar network solution ten years ago using bluetooth when mobile phones did not have open operating systems, and managed to get Motorola and HTC on board but could not at the time convince Nokia or Sony Ericsson.

Mr Ostergaard said he waited for handsets to adopt open platforms before relaunching Norwood Systems in 2011.

"My observation is open platforms win," he said.

In 2012, Norwodd announced it had closed a seed funding round, backed by prominent Perth business angels, which, when combined with Australian Government R&D tax incentives, amounted to $1 million.