As large and diverse as the worldwide digital services marketplace has become, opportunities abound for companies savvy enough to spot and develop profitable niches. Bubble, based in Torrevieja, Spain, has grown such a niche, thanks to unique insight—and the right technology.
A sufficient number of Anglos live and work in Spain to build a business model around. We realized we could capture a significant number of these expatriates by lowering the cost of digital services—particularly the cost of communicating with friends, family and business partners back home in the U.K.
Christophe Pauwels, Chief Technology Officer for Bubble World S.L.
With this vision in mind, Bubble has quickly become the preferred provider for thousands of English households, and businesses with strong U.K. connections, throughout Spain. To make its mix of telephony and ADSL-based wireless/fixed broadband services possible, however, Bubble had to keep its billing and call management services nimble, scalable and affordable. Its solution for such a flexible and cost-effective platform was PortaSwitch, from communications infrastructure company PortaOne.
My previous experience with PortaSwitch at a previous company made the choice easy. PortaSwitch had shown itself to be both reliable and scalable. Plus it has the advanced billing engine features we need to accommodate all the directions we expect our company to grow into.
Christophe Pauwels, Chief Technology Officer for Bubble World S.L.
PortaSwitch is an IP multimedia subsystem capable of handling the complete call control and billing functions of a diversified digital services company. Its combination of softswitch and application servers forms the basis for a broad range of services at Class 5 QoS levels, from VoIP-based PBX and residential calling to broadband Internet access. When coupled with a Cisco Gateway, PortaSwitch provides access to the cloud PBX feature set on Internet telephone and/or circuit-switch technologies.
From the beginning, Bubble depended on PortaSwitch to provide convergent voice/broadband billing. The company uses PortaBilling100 (master, slave, and standby servers to ensure redundancy) to provision and bill customers, as well as multiple PortaSIP servers to control and route the calls and PortaUM for unified messaging and IVRs.
With PortaSwitch we can combine voice, ADSL and wireless services in one monthly bill for our customers. Very few products on the market can accomplish this. Having PortaSwitch on our side enables us to improve our service quality and compete effectively in a crowded digital services marketplace.
Christophe Pauwels, Chief Technology Officer for Bubble World S.L.
As Bubble’s business model evolves, it has the potential to develop new classes of customers as well as relationships with resellers, agents and various other service providers. PortaSwitch, through its support for origination and termination partner agreements, can deliver the partner management and settlement mechanisms that will ensure steady streams of revenue. What’s more, Pauwels says the platform has the capability to accommodate his company’s planned product roadmap.
We foresee expanding into other services such as GSM-based mobile, TV on demand and more. Five years from now we expect to be many times larger than we are now, in both the residential and enterprise segments. However we evolve, we know that PortaSwitch will be able to handle the growth.
Christophe Pauwels, Chief Technology Officer for Bubble World S.L.
