Growing Through Challenge

By Victor Pinto, Head of Engineering Network at Truphone

With coverage in over 206 countries and with over 370 direct network agreements, we’re serious about keeping your devices connected, no matter where they are in the world. But even with that level of focus, we still sometimes encounter a few curve balls, and when you’re tackling the huge technical challenge of building a globe-spanning communications network from the ground up, things don’t always go to plan. Sometimes the unexpected happens and the smooth transfer of information from one part of the world to the other is interrupted. But as with any great endeavor, the important thing is not to falter when things go awry and to use the opportunity to learn and improve things even further.

That’s exactly what happened when a catastrophic hardware failure in our New York Data Centre caused data in our servers to re-route to London in order to maintain service for some of our key IoT clients. But while the data should all have moved across seamlessly, the transfer was incomplete and some of it remained held up in New York. A small number of our customers were affected, so after we notified them, we supported them through the outage with timely communication and kept them informed every step of the way.

It was obviously a less than ideal situation, but thanks to the quick work of our Network Engineering team, our technical team were able to mitigate the problem, restore a smooth transfer of the affected data in less than 90 minutes, and then set to work on identifying the root cause of the problem and the circumstances that brought it about.

It was a complex issue that took a concerted team effort to solve, but after thorough testing and simulation, we were not only able to fix the fail-over problem with our continuous engineering and fault-finding, but we were also able to improve our network capability by adding extra functionality to our systems that would allow us to transfer data regardless of whether the affected networks were 2G, 3G or 4G, thus pre-emptively preventing any future repeat of the of the situation.

Although we’ve worked hard to become one of the world’s leading mobile IoT connectivity and eSIM solution providers, it’s opportunities like this that keep us humble and consistently focused on rolling up our sleeves and finding a better way to do things. We never stop learning and improving our service. That’s why leading connectivity market intelligence and consulting firm Kaleido Intelligence named us as a Champion eSIM Connectivity Provider earlier this year, and why IoT companies around the world trust us to support their international expansion, futureproof their IoT connectivity with eSIM and connect their devices, no matter where they are in the world.

Our mission to enable billions of connections around the world will take continuous learning, and we’ll continue to embrace new problems as opportunities to improve and support our customers through the good and the bad.