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Optimal Decision: Why Teleport Telecom Operator Switched to Hydra Billing

Alex Lashkov, 15 November 2016

Teleport has been providing individuals with access to digital cable TV, Internet and home telephone in the city of Lobnya near Moscow since 2008. Over the eight years of work, the telecom operator has gained some 10,500 active customers, most of whom watch digital TV.

In September 2016, Teleport switched to the Hydra billing. We talked to the company about the experience of replacing the old software.

What Was Wrong With Old Billing

Before Hydra, Teleport tested several billing systems. As Sergei Blinov, Technical Director, pointed out, the company had been using GTDB and PortaBilling for a long time. But none of them satisfied the operator.

Teleport had to drop the GTDB billing due to the lack of marketing capabilities. The billing couldn’t support promotional campaigns or granting discounts to selected clients.

PortaBilling became the next choice after Teleport merged with a VoIP service provider. This system was oriented at phone connection and its business logic was tailored for b2b customers. That brought about some technical problems.

Even crucial operations, like cancelling incorrect payments, were impossible in PortaBilling. Emerging tasks required writing a complicated user case and a lengthy and expensive development process. As a result, Teleport had to wait for up to six months to see improvements. Also, the high cost of tech support made the management extremely unhappy.

After two years of working on Porta, Teleport decided to switch to a SaaS version of Hydra.

«The choice wasn’t accidental: before the transition, I’ve been watching the Hydra billing for about five years and noted a number of undeniable benefits. The transition to Hydra was an optimal decision for our company.»

Sergei Blinov — Technical Director, Teleport

Why Hydra

Sergei believes the well-adjusted logic of how the system works with triggers is Hydra’s main advantage. The billing sends notifications and commands to the company’s server with every new event.

Teleport also appreciated the logic of working with payments. All payments are displayed as e-documents. It’s very important in case of mistakes by employees  — you can fix an error without contaminating the system with too many corrections.

«I wouldn’t say the interface affected the choice of the billing system, as you can get used to any interface. Hydra’s interface is great, though: fast and clear.»

Sergei Blinov — Technical Director, Teleport

Teleport is still testing out Hydra’s marketing сapabilities. After the launch, the company held only one campaign, but the staff says, the process of preparing it was extremely practical.

We like Teleport’s approach to using a new billing. The company digests new marketing features by introducing them gradually. This allows for the avoidance of technical and organizational problems. It’s not a secret that not every marketing campaign is successful. Only the thorough field testing on a limited audience could ensure the success.

Migration Difficulties

Contrary to a common belief, the transition to the new billing didn’t cause any problems to the company. Teleport ordered a service of implementing Hydra. Thus only two of Teleport’s engineers were engaged in the process, combining it with their day-to-day work.

We broke the project into several stages:

The works amounted to a few tasks:

«Setting up control through the firewall was the most complicated task. Hydra’s event system is configured to process the three main events — connection, disconnection and changing a subscriber’s status. In this case, we needed to increase the number of statuses to manage the subscribers’ access more flexibly. Creating subscribers and activating them, activating and deactivating services, changing their settings (like the bandwith) — the logic of how the billing works had to become more complex.»

Sergei Matsak, Lead Engineer at Latera’s implementation department

We had to work hard to understand how to combine these changes with Hydra’s existing capabilities. It helped a lot to discuss the functional demands (which commands to send in which cases) with the client in detail. Below is the screenshot of detailed demands:

image00

Description of commands for the interaction between the billing and the firewall while controlling the access

The process took about three months. We carried out the works from May to September 2016, although we’d reserved over half a year. We think the transition to the new billing and the migration of customer data to the cloud ended swiftly thanks to the client company’s good technical preparation.

«It wasn’t easy, it was lengthy, but painless for Teleport, as we had thoroughly prepared for the migration. They gave us a great engineer who explained all the steps in a plain way. We could say it was a sort of a quest for us, and quite an exciting one.»

Sergei Blinov — Technical Director, Teleport

Migration of customers was one of the biggest challenges. Downloading the data from the old system and its uploading to the new one was supposed to take one day. But the lack of a staff programmer made it impossible to complete the download fast. The information was exported only the following day. As a result, our engineers had to manually check the data uploaded to the cloud.

Interaction With Tech Support

Over the first week after the migration, Teleport staff asked Hydra’s tech support a lot of questions. But then the amount of questions dropped. All the unexpected difficulties, like setting up the Robokassa VISA/MasterCard payment gateway, were fixed with some help from Latera’s engineers.

«Now, our main task is to fine-tune all the options that weren’t envisaged by the previous billing systems. For example, now I’m setting up document templates. I’m not a programmer, so I’m having difficulties from time to time, but I don’t think it’s the billing’s fault. Whenever I have questions to ask, I contact tech support.»

Sergei Blinov — Technical Director, Teleport

 

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