Clearwire

Clearwire

This company provides services to 88 markets in the United States covering 134 million potential subscribers.

Brief description of the company

Clearwire is a wireless broadband Internet service provider (ISP), with offices in the United States, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Denmark (with Danske Telecom) and Mexico (via MVSNet) . It was founded in 2003 and its net income is around USD 730 Millon.

The challenge

Clearwire decided to offer a Dual Mode Data Modem in WiMAX/4G markets with 3G roaming capabilities that are activated and operated on the Sprint network.
In order to improve the time-to-market (TTM), this product was planned to be delivered on their current billing platform, BOSS, with basic systems support.
Clearwire partnered with Hexacta for the development of Dual Model Service project, which was defined to provide an interface to allow interacting with Sprint Wireless Services for the provisioning of the service.

Solution

The main purpose was to provide the means to provision Sprints 3G service to Clearwire’s dual mode capable device.
The solution was implemented as a “middleware” responsible for all the integration issues with Sprint web services, tracking all the transactions, taking care about the logic, and creating a ticket when the integration was not possible.
This middleware:

 

  • Allowed Clearwire systems to retrieve and update the data maintained during the activation process.
  • Interfaced with Clearwire systems to log activity and create trouble tickets as necessary to alert Clearwire service personnel of activation issues.

Hexacta implemented this project in two phases:

 

  • Phase I. The core of the middleware.
  • Phase II. Batch processing solution triggered by command line + Enhancements.

Applied technologies

  • Dual Mode Service is a Java JAX-WS application that exposes several web methods to serve Clearwire’s Dual Mode service provisioning process, acting as a Service Gateway to Sprint API to activate the 3G accounts.
  • This web service is an Axis2 standard web service that uses Springframework for runtime configuration and transaction management, Hibernate as data access layer and MySQL 5.1 as database.
  • The Dual Mode Service needs to interact with several Sprint web services that have standard security requirements: soap header signing and time stamping using an asymmetric key scheme. This was implemented using Axis2’s Apache Rampart security module.