Case Study: TCL Communication achieves near‑100% availability and 10x cost savings with Amazon Web Services

TCL Communication - Customer Case Study

TCL Communication, a global mobile-phone and Internet-device manufacturer, built a Firmware Over the Air (FOTA) service in 2008 to let users update handset firmware via the Internet. Because updates can be large (≈200 MB) and users are worldwide, the company needed high-performance, secure, globally distributed hosting with easy access, no long-term minimum commitments, and low cost.

TCL chose AWS for its functionality and flexibility, running FOTA app servers and MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing across about 20 instances, and using AWS Regions to serve users close to their locations. The move delivered near-100% availability, cut delivery costs by roughly 10x compared with traditional datacenters, sped provisioning from weeks to minutes, and enabled migration of the customer website onto AWS (≈10 EC2 instances with Route 53 and ELB) to withstand DDoS and scale to over 1 million page views per day; the company is also exploring Route 53 and CloudFront to further improve FOTA download speeds.

TCL Communication

Raffi Semerciyan

IS/IT Department Manager