Mobile connectivity at scale, on Prepaid
summary
Company runs prepaid mobile connectivity across nine African countries with 200,000 SIM cards under management, about 20,000 billing events per day, 5,000 physical SIMs shipped monthly and 1,800 customers. Started on LAMP, found product–market fit in 2009, then rewrites to a Python/Django rewrite to scale; integrated a 12,000‑SIM buy‑in from a Namibian operator. Key wins: ops automation that cuts ticket volume ~80%. Pain points: wildly inconsistent telco APIs, fragile Celery workloads, and a GraphQL mistake that needed custom throttling.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and personal story
- 11:11From idea to prepaid solution
- 20:14Legacy code and team rebuild
- 26:07Scaling with people and automation
- 32:49Core scaling principles
- 37:49GraphQL and future plans
- 39:18Reflections on scaling in Africa
- 41:02Closing remarks
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