A 20-year career in the telecommunications industry has only whetted Lynda Burton’s appetite for pushing boundaries.
“It’s a really fantastic part of the business to be in, because Three’s attitude is quite different to other mobile operators’,” she says.
Having spent half of her career at Three, Burton has extensive experience across several sectors of the industry, but saw significant potential for wholesale as part of Three’s high-growth strategy.
After taking control of the wholesale business in 2009, Burton has pushed the business in new directions.
“That was my brief – to go and find wholesale partnerships in segments of the market that we weren’t focussed on directly... to find partners with unique propositions and new innovation in the market,” Burton says.
Following Burton’s appointment, the wholesale arm at Three has been growing at a rate of knots, which she credits to the company’s free-thinking attitude.
“[Three] has a real openness to exploring new business models, a real sense of being the challenger in the market,” she says.
Burton believes Three’s M2M platform, which has provided the company with a separated core network, has been a particular success story in the last year. She claims the platform can help launch partners with a profoundly different cost structure.
“It used to take us about 12 months to bring on a new partner. Now it takes us three weeks, with about the same proportional change in cost,” says Burton.
Burton has enjoyed working on M2M projects such as the Hammersmith flyover advertising board in London, which utilises a Three SIM; TV broadcasting for the 2012 Olympics, which used a number of Three SIMs; and the Glastonbury music festival in the UK, which used CCTV powered by Three SIMs, rather than a fixed broadband solution.
Looking forward, Burton says Three is focussing on telematics, and converting some 2G segments into 3G. “At the moment in telematics, there are SIMs in cars that are transmitting very small amounts of data infrequently, when the car breaks down or there’s an accident, and we’re working to translate that into a 3G opportunity where it becomes an infotainment hub in the car,” she says.
With wholesale starting to take off at high speed in the company, Burton highlights travel and culture as ways to relax and enjoy herself when not at work.
Australia-born Burton moved to London in 2000 and has enjoyed her time immensely in the UK capital.
“I realised how important culture, history and travel are to me, and how much more opportunity I have to experience that being based in London, compared to Sydney.”
