Zaytona ISP
Located in West Bank, Ramallah, Zaytona is the second ISP to be established in Palestine. It has 6 branches in major cities across the country, with over 100 wifi hotspots. The ISP provides internet services for approximately 15,000 commercial and residential customers and also offers dedicated internet services and web hosting.
Choosing the right vendor for network expansion
To cope with a rapidly expanding customer base, Zaytona needed to expand its network to add bandwidth capacity and improve user experience. Recognising that web caching could help, Zaytona deployed a solution to serve a portion of its customers but was disappointed with the experience. It wanted to identify and test an alternative caching solution as Nizar Hamoudah, Network Administrator at Zaytona explains:
“We were discouraged from continuing with our current solution by the high cost of both the appliance and support. On top of that the supplier was not responsive to our concerns and the team weren’t easy to deal with.”
“We were looking to expand our network further but our experience left us unconvinced that we’d get the support we needed from our current vendors. As such we wanted to replace the existing solution with an alternative solution – and expand that if it solved our issues.”
Solution
Having looked at multiple solutions online, Nizar came to the conclusion that CACHEBOX would be the best way forward.
To put CACHEBOX to the test, the ISP decided to deploy one unit to serve 200 wifi users who were not catered to by its existing solution. A lot of traffic from this particular user group came from video files so it was a good representation of other groups and traffic profiles which the ISP catered to.
“We deployed a CACHEBOX100 for this group using WCCP with a Cisco router. A lot of the traffic here comes from video sites and software updates and we often received complaints from these users about slow loading speeds. With our limited bandwidth struggling to cope with large object requests, we had no option other than to place a caching solution there.”
Significant bandwidth savings, dedicated support, excellent value
Since deployment, Zaytona has benefited from improved user experience and significant bandwidth savings. Nizar comments on his experience:
“ApplianSys’ CACHEBOX is a great solution. Three main things stood out for me: Firstly, CACHEBOX saved us a lot of bandwidth and allowed us to improve customer satisfaction dramatically. Our wifi users don’t complain about slow browsing speeds anymore.”
“For our 200 wifi hub users we get substantial savings from software updates like Macromedia (up to 91%), Windows (up to 24%), and Adobe (35%). We expect even greater savings as the number of users connected through CACHEBOX increases.”
“Other prominent savings include YouTube which accounts for around half of our traffic – we get 40%+ savings on files from ytimg.com and video content is where we save the most.”
Secondly, the support we received from our previous vendor was extremely displeasing. In contrast, ApplianSys is a company that cares about its customers. We received tremendous support from the team even after I bought CACHEBOX – the team called me and checked how my unit was performing! This is rare in my experience. I decided then that for any future caching solutions, I would only consider CACHEBOX.
“Finally, the price of CACHEBOX is sensible. It is a great value solution!”
CACHEBOX a sure bet
“We were very impressed with CACHEBOX’s ease of use and its value for money,” comments Nizar.
“On average we add around 300 users per month to our network, with varying traffic patterns. So, we’re pretty certain that we’re going to need more caching power to accommodate this. We’ve got plans to buy another CACHEBOX – the high end 310 for a larger group of customers – such as commercial internet cafes, offices and the like. I have no doubt that CACHEBOX will be our choice for this.”
