Bill Amelio had planned to leave his position as president and CEO of CHC Helicopter in early 2015 and focus his attention on charitable work. He had spent the first 18 years of his career at IBM, moved to Dell to become president for Asia-Pacific and then served as CEO of Lenovo from December 2005 to February 2009. He was looking forward to doing more in his role as chairman of Caring for Cambodia, a non-profit organisation he founded with his wife, Jamie, to provide free education to impoverished children.

Then, he got a Facebook message from an old friend. Masoud Bassiri, chairman of wireless network solutions provider Consistel, asked if he was interested in a new job. Amelio had already been batting away offers. But a conversation with Bassiri intrigued him. “I was in disbelief at first,” he says. Bassiri had explained how Consistel was building topnotch mobile networks in less time and with fewer resources than usual. “For example, Reflections, which should have taken eight to nine months to get wired up, was completed in eight weeks,” Amelio says, referring to Reflections at Keppel Bay, a condominium project that Consistel wired up.

Bassiri was talking about replicating the process across the entire country. “Imagine for just a moment that you’re able to essentially get outdoor coverage and get hundreds, maybe a thousand buildings, completed in a year, and have a network that’s better than what’s existing today,” Amelio says. Why would it be better? “It’s because you don’t have to worry about the backward integration associated with legacy systems that are already out there. You place all the antennas in the most efficient and effective spots across the country and in buildings.”