Walk into any small ISP office in Dhaka's residential districts — Mirpur, Mohammadpur, Uttara — and you'll likely find the same setup: one person on a laptop, a wall covered in hand-drawn network diagrams, a WhatsApp group called "Due Payments," and a MikroTik router that was set up three years ago and hasn't been touched since.
This isn't incompetence. These ISPs are running services for 200–2,000 subscribers per month. They're profitable businesses. But their internal systems are entirely improvised.
How billing works at a typical small ISP:
- A staff member checks a notebook or Excel sheet to see who hasn't paid.
- They send a WhatsApp message to the customer.
- If no response in 3 days, they manually disable the PPPoE account on MikroTik.
- Customer calls. Staff enables it manually. Logs nothing.
- At month end, the owner counts what was collected and estimates profit.
There's no audit trail. No invoice history. No way to know if the field agent collected ৳500 from a customer or pocketed it. No automated late fee. No aging report.
Why hasn't software solved this already?
A few ISP billing systems exist in Bangladesh — RADIUS-based tools from local vendors, or expensive imported solutions. But they fail in three ways:
- They require a RADIUS server and a Linux-savvy sysadmin to operate. Most small ISPs don't have one.
- They don't speak the local payment language. bKash and Nagad dominate. Most billing tools still expect bank transfers.
- They're single-ISP tools. If you run a chain of three ISPs in different cities, you manage three separate systems.
I spent weeks interviewing ISP operators, visiting offices, and mapping their actual workflows before writing a line of code. The conclusion was clear: the tool needed to be SaaS-hosted (no on-premise server), MikroTik-native (not RADIUS), bKash-first, and reseller-aware.
That's what Manfi NetOps is built to be.
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Mustafa Kamal Hossain
Founder & Principal Engineer at Manfi. Passionate about Laravel, SaaS architecture, and high-performance engineering.