How BNESIM built their global mobile network on the agility of the cloud

BNESIM is an international mobile operator offering Data, Voice and Messaging connections in 170+ countries without roaming charges. Our mission is to connect people with people, machines with machines, and even people with machines, where ever they are. We've built our platform with over 340, and growing, local telecom operator networks with different speeds, stability, and overall performance.

We live in the age of connection. As digital cosmopolitans, we can't afford a single hour without the Internet. No one can accept a sloppy connection or bad sound quality during phone calls. This is why our technical team is a group of stressed people, affected by insomnia, anxiety, panic, and even uncontrollable crying crises! Jokes aside, it would not be possible to deliver our high level of service without the help of our technical partners at UpCloud.

Previous challenges

We began before "cloud" had generated any hype among the tech nerds and so have been self-hosting our servers around the world for the last twenty years. When our customer base started reaching 50, 70, 100, and now 170 countries, we realized that we needed to be more agile. We tested all the major players on the market looking for the performance we needed: high bandwidth, low latency and fast disk access. UpCloud was the winner of our benchmarks and, to this day, they have never let us down.

Test hosting on UpCloud!

Hosting on UpCloud

Almost our whole platform is run on UpCloud's infrastructure: Data gateways, Voice gateways, user management, and billing. We have several UpCloud servers, all of them relatively small. We prefer to distribute the load on multiple nodes with a maximum of 16GB of memory each. Thanks to this, we are able to horizontally scale our services by just adding a new node at any moment with zero downtime.

With our current configuration, we are able to support hundreds of thousands of customers. However, our simulations show that we could scale to several millions of customers without any software changes. Our high availability setup has proven very reliable, we haven’t had a single outage due to technical problems while hosting on UpCloud. What more could you ask for!

Improvements

At BNESIM, we carefully monitor the performance of our services in real time. UpCloud deployment in 45 seconds gives us superpowers we could never have with physical servers. We can deploy a new node when we need it, where we need it. If, for example, we have an unexpected number of customers in America, we can activate a new voice gateway in less than a minute, automatically thanks to the UpCloud API! The new gateway will connect to the other nodes in the network, using the fast private network, protected by an extra layer of encryption, and be immediately available for our customers.

Another feature we can never thank UpCloud enough for is the scheduled backups. We already had in place plenty of processes to keep our data safe, but scheduling an additional backup for the full disk of the virtual machines is a priceless addon to avoid any data loss.

Future plans

The reality is, that the more customers we get as we grow, the more we will need to utilize UpCloud.

If we could ask for one thing it would be to expand UpCloud's service to more regions. We are dreaming of seeing a new location in the Middle East to better serve the many customers we already have there. Then we at BNESIM would be able to fully embrace our love of UpCloud!