Roberto Falconi Cardona is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Puntonet S.A. He is responsible for helping accelerate economic and social development through internet services. He details how Cisco Services helped Puntonet optimize its network so subscribers across the country have access to fast, reliable, and secure internet services.

Puntonet S.A. is a telecommunications and IT services company headquartered in Quito, Ecuador. The company was established in 1999, and has grown steadily over the past two decades. In 2021, Puntonet increased its net sales revenue by more than 10 percent, and its staff has grown to more than 800 employees.

At Puntonet, we are passionate about the real impact technology can have on both our business and customers. Our mission is not only to deliver exceptional service and provide customers with the best technologies, but also to help drive economic and social growth for our country.

We accomplish this mission through delivering fast, secure, dependable internet service to our customers. Our network infrastructure is the foundation for making this happen.

Building on two decades of innovation

Since I joined Puntonet 22 years ago, our leadership team has constantly focused on meeting and exceeding customer needs through constant innovation.

Although we are a small company, our goal is to dramatically improve the lives of our 300,000 subscribers. This means giving people access to everything from communication with friends and family to banking services, education, and government services.

Change happens fast for internet service providers (ISPs). We must constantly innovate and transform our organization to stay competitive and keep pace with the latest technologies, so we can provide our customers with a top-notch experience.

When our CEO, Katherin Miño, launched a new initiative to optimize our network so that it was faster, more reliable, and more stable, we turned to our longtime technology partner, Cisco.

Internet service enhanced across the country

One of the key goals of our network optimization program was to expand the access of` high-performance networking to business and residential customers throughout Ecuador. We wanted to deploy a fiber ring capable of delivering 400 Gbps performance across the entire country, to all subscribers, even those in rural areas, a new level of speed and reliability.

We also wanted to upgrade the interconnection in our data center to Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and strengthen our security.

Because we needed to help ensure resiliency and maintain performance while we were upgrading our technology, we selected Cisco Services to provide expert guidance. These experts utilized analytics, automation, and the insights learned from other customers to help us get the outcomes we needed, faster.

The Cisco team also helped ensure that our upgrade to the new technology went smoothly by providing risk mitigation and design review services. They collaborated with us to fully understand our service objectives and help ensure that the technology we deployed was completely aligned to the business outcomes we required.

In addition, we were experiencing an excessive number of network problem logs, which were overwhelming us with manual tasks and slowing productivity. The Cisco team provided assistance with log analysis to offload these cumbersome tasks and free up our team to focus on other responsibilities and more strategic activities.

We also worked with the Cisco Services team to help ensure our software remained compliant and fully up to date with our installed hardware.

The Cisco team provided a hardware lifecycle milestone report to help us better understand and prioritize solutions that needed upgrades or software patches. This helped us to optimize our services and mitigate any risks before they caused interruptions for our customers.

Achieving network reliability and security

The expertise provided by the Cisco team has helped us achieve business outcomes across Puntonet. We have streamlined our processes to make day-to-day operations more efficient, which helps us achieve cost savings.

We completely transformed and modernized our existing IT systems, without impacting our customers—helping us maintain our position as a top service provider in the country. With the guidance of Cisco experts, we reduced the number of logs from approximately 200,000 to 90,000.

We have successfully implemented operating system software versions of our platforms according to the manufacturers’ recommendations and have created a process to update to new versions and protocols according to industry best practices.

We also created a visualization and analysis of the network, to enable timely decision making in response to failures that may occur in the network. Additionally, we conducted a detailed analysis to determine the causes of network failures in the city of Guayaquil.

Through this analysis, we also developed recommendations for new applications in the national network. We also used the results of the analysis to transfer actionable information to the Puntonet networking staff.

Security is always a top priority for our organization—and our end customers. Cisco Services helped us configure and strengthen the security of our network to better address today’s latest security threats and mitigate risk.

And finally, we’ve defined the roadmap for the design and deployment of the IP Network for the future.

Partnering with ChildFund to connect rural students with online education

As telecommunications are a main driver of economic and social growth throughout Ecuador, Puntonet is now partnering with the government on strategic initiatives that will positively impact the entire country.

We’re excited about our initiative with ChildFund International, a child-focused international development organization that helps children facing poverty and other challenges. Through this partnership, we will leverage our new network to provide connectivity to students in rural areas, enabling them to continue their education.

The recent pandemic has made us even more aware of the importance of the internet for education and economic development. Puntonet is also providing cybersecurity guidance to corporations and individuals throughout the country.

Having a secure, high-performance Cisco network in place makes these initiatives possible.

We’re proud of our commitment to our customers and the community. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Cisco to deliver innovative offerings and provide more inclusive, reliable, secure services to customers throughout Ecuador.