They moved 7.7 million customers.
Nobody noticed a thing.
Dish and Boost case study
The situation
Boost Mobile’s transition to Dish wasn’t a routine systems upgrade. It was the rapid formation of anew wireless business.
Millions of customers needed to be migrated offlegacy systems tied to the previous ownership structure and onto a new platform built specifically for Boost’s future.
But the goal wasn’t just migration. Boost wanted theflexibility to innovate faster, launch new experiences, and avoid inheriting the same operational constraints that slowed traditional telecom providers down.
The challenge
move millions of subscribers withoutdisrupting service, while building a foundationcapable of supporting long-term innovation.
Why it worked
Most migrations are high-drama projects defined by big-bang cutovers, reconciliation headaches, and frantic rollbacks. Wavelo approached it differently.
The foundation was Wavelo's event-driven architecture (EDA), a system where customer actions like activations, payments, and plan changes trigger real-time updates across all connected systems simultaneously.
That real-time backbone made a controlled, phased migration possible:
• Legacy and modern systems ran side by side for validation, eliminating a forced cutover
• EDA kept both environments in sync without manual reconciliations
• Migrations ran in controlled batches of up to 200,000 subscribers per day, with automatic retries and full visibility
• New activations and migrations didn't have to pause while the platform changed
The business outcomes
- Fast migration: 7.7M subscribers moved in under four months with zero downtime.
- Cost savings: Millions saved monthly through optimized plans and automation.
- Speed to market: New offers launch in hours, not weeks.
- Churn: Dropped below 3% after the release of unified billing.
- Operational efficiency: Automated fallout resolution significantly reduced operational overhead and improved the scalability of port-in operations.
Billing that didn't break
Conventional wisdom says billing systems break somewhere around a million subscribers. Roughly 80% of vendors have failed to clear that bar. Wavelo crossed it without incident or disruption.
Throughout the migration, the team continued releasing new capabilities, including tier discounts, multi-subscription billing, and a payment extension feature that became a meaningful revenue generator for Boost. Rather than treat the billing system as untouchable, Wavelo engineered a clean solution that didn’t break. Shannon, a long-tenured Boost executive, noted that Wavelo was the first billing vendor she'd ever encountered that was willing to touch the system this frequently.
Breaking the prepaid/postpaid divide
Most mobile carriers run separate systems for prepaid and post paid billing. Switching between them means customers must change their numbers, re-enroll, or both.
Wavelo built a configuration layer that removes that constraint entirely, freeing customers to move between prepaid and postpaid on the same number, through the same portal.
When Boost's new leadership decided to merge its prepaid and postpaid brands into a single unified offering, other vendors quoted 10 months and a full re-architecture. Wavelo was ready in one month.
Thanks to that flexibility, churn dropped below 3%.
The operational efficiency play
Port-in, the act of transferring a customer's number from another carrier, has been handled the same way for 30 years. Following this standard approach, about 30% of port-ins experience fallout, meaning the transfer stalls. If customers aren't ported within two hours, most will usually walk away to a different carrier.
Most carriers manage this by staffing a concierge team of 10 or more to manually chase down each failed port. It's expensive, can't run 24/7, and doesn't scale. Wavelo developed an automated port-in fallout solution with several layers: smart retries triggered by specific error conditions, machine learning to flag and reroute stuck ports, and automated hold resolution for complex scenarios.
The system detects the state, instructs Boost to notify the customer, then retries automatically until the port completes. As a result, tasks that previously required a team of 75 people now require just 10-15, enabling Boost to redirect those employees toward higher-value work.
