When Ucha.se first became a customer of Neterra in 2012, they required the entire telecoms solution from consultation, to installation and configuration of a managed dedicated server, to technical support and on-going advice.
Ucha.se needed a supplier they could trust, who was flexible and scalable, and who could help them set up everything from scratch. Since then, Ucha.se's business has grown steadily, and Neterra's network engineers and IT specialists have increased resources and scaled the solution to meet these needs.
In March 2020, however, the situation is unusual! Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Bulgarian schools are closing, and students are taking online training. Suddenly, Ucha.se's peak traffic jumped by 2,490%.
Anyone who has used the platform at the time knows that users do not feel the huge increase in network load in any way.
The site, videos and tutorials are available all the time in high quality. They run quickly and smoothly, despite the increased demand.
Learn how Neterra found the best solution for the Ucha.se portal during the lockdown.
Ucha.se - meaning ‘I learn’ in Bulgarian - is a multiple award winning educational platform hosting over 16,000 video lessons and tests in accordance with the official Bulgarian school programme. Since its launch in 2012, Ucha.se’s educational videos have been viewed over 65,000,000 times by over 600,000 registered students, teachers, parents, and students (as of August 2020).
Darin Madzharov, the founder of Ucha.se, met Neven Dilkov, the founder of Neterra, through a mentorship programme to help develop and support young and gifted talent. Through this partnership, Neterra supplied for several months services free of charge to help get Ucha.se up and running. Once Ucha.se’s popularity started growing, they built on the already well-established partnership and relied upon Neterra to continue supplying all connectivity services that would be required.
In March 2020, the situation is unusual!
Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Bulgarian schools are closing, and students are taking online training.
Suddenly, Ucha.se's peak traffic jumped by 2,490%.
Like many companies in 2020, the spread of Coronavirus had an impact on Ucha.se.At the start of March, each European country announced their own lockdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19. On Friday 6th March 2020, the Bulgarian government announced there would be a lockdown, but at that point, an exact date had not been declared.Just one week later, on Friday 13th March 2020, it was announced that lockdown in Bulgaria would begin on Monday 16th March 2020 leaving just 48 hours before lockdown to implement this network upgrade.Knowing the added pressure their network would be under during lockdown, it was imperative that their network performance continued to be flawless providing much needed learning materials and educational support for existing students and teachers who were continuing their education from home.Ucha.se asked for help to upgrade their entire network so it’d be able to support increased usage without suffering any downtime.
Neterra’s engineering team worked 10-12 hour days for seven days to design it and 48 hours to implement it in preparation for lockdown; network architects redesigned the entire infrastructure, and network engineers installed this new solution that was flexible and would be able support this new heightened demand.
This re-design and subsequent upgrades ensured there was plenty of bandwidth for all users to smoothly access the platform with no burst fees being incurred.
Our team’s hard work to make sure the entire solution would work up to our standards really paid off; Bulgarian students were able to watch these lessons and continue their education uninterrupted which is an incredibly invaluable final result.
Ucha.se started their partnership with Neterra in 2012 with a relatively small order; just one server in their wholly-owned data centre, SDC (Sofia Data Center) ensuring 100% availability and uptime, and a 100Mbps Internet connection for access.
Neterra’s flexibility and scalability became a major positive point because once Ucha.se’s name spread, the volume of learning resources also increased thus requiring a significant upgrade to their solution; one server grew to more than 13.
Before lockdown - as students were in school and Ucha.se was purely used for support to complement the Bulgarian education syllabus - the network pushed a relatively low average of around 200 Mbps of traffic.
However, as Ucha.se became one of the main lesson-providers for Bulgarian students during the Coronavirus lockdown, Ucha.se experienced a very steep increase in usage; there was a huge jump of 750Mbps - an increase of over 365% from the norm, and during high-usage times this traffic hit 5Gpbs, a massive increase of 2 490%.
