In 2017, Marc was attending law school, still living with his parents, as they moved from the city to the suburbs. The only responsibility they gave him was taking care of their internet plan.
Alas, only one ISP offered something in their area; 3mbps at $75 a month. Let that sink in for a moment; 3mbps at $75. If you are not familiar with current prices, it’s a lot of money for almost nothing!
Underwhelmed by the options afforded to his family, he called the only person he knew in the telecom space - Francis, who was working at Bell at the time.
Francis proposed something really simple to Marc; his parents would have to set up a telecom tower in their backyard. I guess ‘simple’ is subjective.
Building on this idea, Marc and Francis spent two years deploying physical networks in three Quebec cities under the name Acces Telecom. Acces Telecom’s main goal was to decrease the digital divide in their home province.
During this time, the co-founders learned many lessons, but two stand out in retrospect:
Marc and Francis knew people loved and needed the internet, but they also knew that dealing with service providers kind of sucked; you pay for your internet, but you don’t have any control over it. Their idea was to change the way people think about accessing the internet —make it simple for customers to connect to the internet.
To materialize their vision, Access Telecom wouldn’t do; it was too small in scope. And just like that, oxio was born ✨
The goal was to make the internet cater to humans again through an ISP that offered transparent pricing, customer-centric operations, and reliable services; Making the internet accessible and responsive to everyone - using software as the “access layer” for existing physical infrastructure.
Acces Telecom was tackling a symptom, but oxio was (and still is) addressing the cause by changing the telecom industry wherever it could. Big telco bullshit? Gone. Contracts? No, thanks. Shifty pricing? Never.
In order to realize oxio’s mission, we needed the proper tools to manage an ever-growing customer base. Customer service tools, an inventory management platform, customer onboarding and activation, networking and so much more were all aspects we needed to find good solutions for. This wasn’t easy, to say the least.
Fortunately, we are a very creative team, so we found sub-par solutions and tweaked them as much as we could to achieve what we needed, but long term, it wasn’t a viable solution.
That's when the idea of gaiia started to bloom — our own OSS/BSS platform, that we would use for oxio, tailored to our needs and reality.
As oxio scaled from zero customer to over fifty thousands from 2020 to 2023, we built a full-blown engineering and product team to build gaiia internally. They did an exceptional job.
Each time we integrated more features to gaiia, we got remarkably more efficient. We went from employing 1 customer care specialist per 1,240 subscribers at our beginnings, to 1 every 1,600 subscribers once gaiia was operational. This represents a ~30% improvement in operating efficiency, all while offering a world-class customer experience.
By Q3 2022, we were running the entire oxio business (now generating >$40M ARR) on gaiia.