A big challenge that most telecom operators face when moving to the cloud is the existing physical cable connections with their partners and direct IP routing to their data center. PortaOne—which provides business support system (BSS), billing, and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions for telecoms—has created a unique hybrid solution that overcomes this challenge.
When PortaOne tested this solution for Arqia, a telco formerly called Vodafone Brazil, only a few servers were left to handle network connections in the data center. The rest of the infrastructure was deployed in the cloud, connecting to the data center via VPN and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect service. The tests proved that while a system based on physical servers has a limited maximum performance, deployment in the cloud provides easy, almost linear scalability, along with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Using its hybrid solution with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, PortaOne simulated voice over IP (VoIP) and Internet of Things (IoT) services and saw a performance level that was 27% higher than the client required.
Arqia’s Challenges
Arqia is the first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in Brazil focused on the IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) segment. The company started its IoT operations as a partner of Vodafone Group to support global IoT connectivity in Brazil. It later rebranded to better reflect its focus on industry-leading M2M and IoT mobility solutions. The telco wanted to scale its softswitch (PortaSwitch) and billing (PortaBilling) solutions to help it support its growing IoT and long-distance VoIP customers and to meet the demands of increasing traffic.
In its VoIP segment, Arqia’s existing PortaSwitch hardware configuration was limiting the maximum number of transactions the system could handle per second, and therefore limiting its potential revenue stream. The configuration allowed for a maximum of 450 calls per second (CPS), but Arqia wanted more than twice that, with a top goal of 1000 CPS. Scaling their existing infrastructure to that level, though, would require a lot of capital spending. And, more than that, Arqia was concerned about the need to purchase new hardware again and again as the company grew, plus the risk of wasted investment on unused infrastructure if, at any point, growth fell below projections.
Arqia also needed to prepare for massive growth in its IoT segment: at least 1.5 million SIM cards and beyond. Moving the service to the cloud would be easy because Arqia had no physical cable connections with partners, as with the VoIP segment. But the company wasn’t sure whether a cloud solution would be able to handle the expected traffic increase.
The Hybrid Infrastructure Deployment
PortaOne offered a solution: hosting both PortaSwitch and PortaBilling in the cloud for better scalability for both the IoT and VoIP segments. For the VoIP service, PortaOne also offered to keep the softswitch SIP servers at Arqia’s own data center. This approach let Arqia maintain its existing relationships with carrier partners because the IP interconnections remained on premises.
After evaluating several options, PortaOne selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for its high performance and the elasticity of its computing and storage resources. Compared to other popular cloud platforms, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is more reliable at processing requests in real time and has minimal data transmission delays because of its use of bare metal servers and the high-performance design of its internal network.
To prove the reliability and high scalability of these solutions for Arqia, PortaOne performed real-time tests using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. During testing, a single BM.DenseIO2.52 cloud server processed over 20,000 simultaneous calls without losing quality of sound. It would not be possible to achieve these same results with any other popular cloud platform.
The testing of this hybrid softswitch solution showed a performance level of 1270 CPS. This is 27% more than Arqia’s initial requirement of 1000 CPS.
High performance was also proven during the testing of the cloud deployment of IoT billing. More importantly, the tests showed that the capacity of the solution can be easily scaled simply by using more billing nodes. With six billing nodes, the system could support 12.6 million devices—eight times more than Arqia’s initial requirement of 1.5 million devices.
Customer Experiences
From Daniel Fuchs, Arqia Founder and Innovation Influencer:
“In the test for the VoIP service, the system was processing over 1200 connection attempts in a second, which translates to over 180,000 simultaneously callers. That capacity is enough to provide communication services on a regular basis for approximately 2 million people. In the IoT test, a rapid increase in the number of devices was simulated. We started with 0.5 million devices, gradually increased the number, and proved that up to 12.6 million devices can be successfully supported. Having ensured that the solution is reliable, we migrated our existing IoT business to the OCI.”
From Andriy Zhylenko, PortaOne CEO:
“PortaOne is offering a mixed solution with only a few servers remaining in the data center to handle network connections with the CSP’s partners. The rest of the infrastructure is deployed in the cloud and connected to the data center via VPN and/or OCI FastConnect. No matter what legacy network connections telcos have, they can migrate their infrastructure to the cloud and increase capacity as much as they need. This approach allows telcos to significantly reduce their operating costs, simplify day-to-day infrastructure maintenance, and support rapid business growth.”
The Bottom Line
PortaOne and Arqia have proven that a mixed configuration of cloud deployment and physical servers is a reliable and scalable solution for any telecom operator’s business. This approach provides a high performance level with cloud scalability and a much lower TCO while maintaining the legacy physical interconnections with other carriers.
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