Client Background
The Office of Communications (Ofcom) is the UK government approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom.
Ofcom provide advice and information to thousands of users and suppliers each year, helping people and businesses make informed decisions on their broadband and mobile services as well as providing a range of other services.
Customer Challenge
Ofcom’s challenge was to create two highly performant API’s to provide access to broadband quality and mobile connectivity data across the entire UK, by postcode.
The first API would enable a huge range of businesses to have access to the most up to date information on 3 types of broadband service and empower both commercial businesses and the general public to make informed decisions about their broadband provider in a specific local area.
The second API would enable consumers to have access to the same data but for mobile connectivity, allowing them to make informed decisions about their mobile provider within a specific local area.
Requirements
The dataset included information covering 1.6 millions postcodes covering 16 million homes, adding to the complexity of the challenge. As the UK’s approved regulatory authority, this project had to be complete to the highest possible quality and meet a range of requirements including:
- Near instant worldwide response
- Rate limits to avoid misuse
- Quota limits to allow for tiered access
- Secured access
- Load testing to prove the robustness
- Multiple environments for varying levels of QA with fast and reliable migrations
- A developer portal for Ofcom’s clients to gain access
Solution
The performant APIs were built using the powerful Azure cloud platform and a range of Azure tools and resources.
We worked closely with Ofcom’s solution architects and technical specialists to develop the APIs and release them to their clients.
The solution allows API subscribers to access the latest broadband and mobile coverage data, by postcode.
The API subscribers request data from Azure API Management, which delegates to Cosmos DB to retrieve the data and APIM adds rate limiting, quota limiting as required.
