Ucha.se Case Study

Who is Ucha.se?

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).

 

How did you hear of NetIX?

Darin Madzharov, the founder of Ucha.se, met Neven Dilkov, the founder of NetIX, through a mentorship programme to help develop and support young and gifted talent. Through this partnership, NetIX supplied services free of charge for a few months 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 NetIX to continue supplying all connectivity services that would be required.

 

The challenges:

When Ucha.se first became a customer of NetIX in 2012, they required the entire telecoms solution from consultation, to installation and configuration, 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.

 

The added challenge:

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.

 

The solution:

Ucha.se started their partnership with NetIX 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.

NetIX’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 200Mbps 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 2490%.

 

The result:

NetIX’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.