Wavelo, a Tucows-owned billing and provisioning company, is striving to help telcos better manage their relationship with their customers, according to CEO Justin Reilly.
Since the end of fourth quarter 2022, Wavelo increased its subscriber base from 2 million to over 8 million in Q2 2023. Revenue of $10.8 million rose 20% year on year from $9 million in Q2 2022.
Wavelo’s two biggest customers are Dish Wireless and fellow Tucows subsidiary Ting Internet. Reilly said the migration of Boost Mobile customers to the Wavelo platform was “the largest migration we completed this year…at its peak we were migrating more than 200,000 customers per night.”
As for Ting, Wavelo has moved “their entire operation” to its Internet Service Operating System (ISOS) platform. Reilly described the provider as “one of the most customer-centric if not the most customer-centric fiber telecom I’ve ever seen.”
Launched in January 2022, Wavelo is a relative newcomer in the operation support system/ business support system (OSS/BSS) space, competing with incumbents like Amdocs, Netcracker and Nokia.
One of Wavelo’s goals is to provide telcos an alternative to existing operation OSS/BSS solutions but allow them to keep using some of their legacy OSS/BSS platforms, if they want.
“What’s been true in the industry for a really long time is pretty bespoke, monolithic software,” Reilly told Fierce.
He said when telecom companies talk about how it’s hard to make changes or if an offer takes too long to get to market, “that’s largely due to the way the industry has built software.”
With modular event-based architecture, which is what Wavelo is offering, “essentially each core component of it is its own module.”
For example, companies could take Wavelo’s product catalog “if they like it,” but they can also use their own product catalog. That logic can apply for other elements of the billing and provisioning process, such as ticketing and address intelligence payments.
“It allows our customers to get what they need from us but not be constrained by us having to do everything for them,” said Reilly.
Say a telco wants to bring in another vendor for its support ticketing software. Typically, the integration process can take years, but Wavelo provides an easier option.
“What we would say is, hey we generalized in the event stream what support ticketing should look like with the rest of the world. Choose your vendor and we’ll make it really easy for you to swap in and out of ticketing software,” Reilly explained. “This is a bit of a big idea in telecom, because there’s not a lot of that today.”
“I firmly believe that cloud native and event-driven will be table stakes in telecom in the next decade, particularly for the stack,” he added. “We’re just a bit early in the transition.”
For more details on Wavelo and Tucows’ Q2 performance, check out our recent earnings coverage.