Timenet: from one-by-one checks to objective data on the customer base

About Timenet

Timenet S.p.A. is an Italian telecommunications operator with over 30 years of activity, specialised in connectivity services and managed solutions for companies and partners. It runs a large base of MikroTik routers installed at end customers and partners, supporting service distribution and assistance through a widespread partner network across the country. Timenet's mission is to keep customer satisfaction as high as possible, with reliable, innovative solutions and qualified technical support.

The challenge: actually knowing the state of the installed base

Before OptiWize the problem was not configuring a single device; it was getting a reliable picture of the whole installed base.

"The challenge was not having a dashboard that let us see, across the customer base, how many devices were actually online, how many were not, and the health of the routers. They had to be checked one by one."

Spot checks, device by device, do not produce an objective measure: they tell you how that single check went, not how the installed base is doing. With hundreds of devices spread across different customers, that kind of control does not scale and the real state of the network stays an assumption.

On the backup side, the previous system was the device itself sending an email with a weekly export. It worked until it was actually needed: at the moment of a failure, the configuration available for recovery might not be the one from the day before.

Why OptiWize

Federico gives three reasons, in order of weight.

The first is the scarcity of real alternatives for governing a MikroTik installed base centrally.

The second is that the platform proved extensible: "once we saw the demo it looked interesting and expandable on several levels, which is exactly what we did: we customised it over time". All of this while keeping the core of the platform intact, with updates and fixes guaranteed by the OptiWize team rather than falling on the customer.

The third is the direct relationship with the team: "one more request, one more question, one more clarification, one more piece of advice is easier with an external company we have already worked with".

How Timenet uses OptiWize today

Technical consultancy. Every technician in the department uses it daily to manage, monitor and support the devices in the field.

Delivery and recovery. When a device fails, the backup held in OptiWize allows the customer to be brought back into service with their own configuration, not a generic one: "we don't put a generic configuration on it, we restore the configuration the router had". The difference is substantial: on one side a customer who is operational again as soon as the faulty router is replaced, on the other a customer who does come back online but, to be back at 100%, has to retrieve their own network configuration and pass it to the technicians so they can put it back on the device.

Partners. This is the use Federico points to as the most innovative one. A partner can run a first debug straight from their own desk, something that was not possible before: giving access to a MikroTik meant creating a dedicated user on the device and replicating it across all of that partner's customers, and the partner needed a fair amount of know-how on MikroTik, on Timenet's customisations and on operating the router. With OptiWize the partner works with their own account, the interface is user friendly, no device-specific credentials are needed and every action stays tracked. Access today is read-only; the next step planned is operational access, again tracked per user.

Results

The main result is the one that was missing at the start: objective data.

"On the various dashboards I have objective data on what is in production."

Everything else follows from that:

• the state of the installed base can be checked at any time, without manual one-by-one controls
• restores faithful to the customer's real configuration, instead of a weekly export by email
• first-level support distributed to partners, without handing over credentials or responsibility for the custom configurations on the devices
• actions tracked per user, with visibility on who did what
• a data base useful for compliance, a topic Federico explicitly connects to NIS2 obligations and to centralised management of security updates

The next step the two companies share is the integration between OptiWize and Galileo, Timenet's own system.

Asked whether he would recommend it to a colleague, the answer was clear: "Absolutely yes. We have greater control over our customer base, so I would definitely recommend it to a company like ours, one that uses MikroTik as the brand for the routers it supplies to its customers."