ROMING: Roaming Moolah

International roaming today is the most profitable segments
in wireless business. In the GSM world, where international roaming is available
almost on a seamless basis, the annual roaming business volume is estimated at
$50 billion per annum. With the GSM subscriber base being over a billion
globally, the travel-enhanced services in a roaming environment are very
compelling both from a customer-experience and revenue-opportunity perspective.

One of the largest gaps in roaming has been the
unavailability of several services in a roaming environment, which are available
in the home environment. This is due to services not rolled out uniformly across
roaming partner networks and limitations of a interconnect environment.
Following are some of these.

Caller Line Identification

In the home network, wireless customers usually get CLI of calling party,
which helps them decide whether to answer a call. However, availability of CLI
in roaming environments is patchy and very often not available. The impact of
this is significant, as customers end up answering calls that are very
expensive, ranging from $1—4 a minutes, simply because CLI was not available.
CLI is also critical for privacy. Customers may not want to take calls from
unfamiliar numbers. There is an opportunity for application providers and
carriers to resolve this gap and provide customers continuous availability of
CLI in a roaming environment.

Seamless Availability of GPRS

Today data services play a key role in the wireless world by making Internet
and data access truly mobile. Availability of data services in the home
environment is today a reality. However, the same is not true in the roaming
environment. The reason is absence of GPRS roaming contracts between roaming
partners. The paradox being, on an average, less that 30 percent of roaming
contracts for a given carrier are live on GPRS. Some of the reasons for slow
growth of GPRS roaming contracts include: the need for a separate GPRS roaming
contract, a parallel testing procedure, and the need to have a GRX (GPRS roaming
exchange node) interface between partners.

There is a need to cover the balance 70 percent to be able to
provide customers equal opportunity of data access while roaming. The
opportunity for carriers and application providers is to simplify GPRS roaming
contracts and service setup.

Prepaid Roaming

One of the drivers of wireless growth globally has been the introduction of
prepaid options. In most developing markets in Asia and Africa, over 80 percent
of the market constitutes prepaid subscribers. On an average, today 70 percent
of the GSM global subscriber base are prepaid customers. While voice roaming
enables roaming for prepaid and postpaid accounts, prepaid roaming still has
basic limitations wherein prepaid customers in a roaming environment enjoy only
incoming voice calls and SMS and outgoing SMS, purely as a result of technology
limitation. To address this, the GSM Association introduced CAMEL (phase 2),
which would enable full service to prepaid roaming customers in a roaming
environment. While CAMEL phase 2 clearly addressed the problem, it required
carriers to enter into a CAMEL roaming contract and incremental testing and
business configurations to facilitate the same. Unfortunately, CAMEL-roaming
adoption has been very slow in the GSM world, it is estimated that less than 35
percent of the roaming contracts worldwide are CAMEL compliant. There is clearly
a compelling need for the industry to step in and bridge this gap with an
ingenious technology to enable full service to prepaid roamers in the GSM world.

Quality of Service

In all service businesses, the businesses that service customers directly
own all responsibility to ensure service quality and availability. In the
wireless world, the home network has a direct relationship with its customers
and is responsible for providing a minimum quality of service to its customers.
However, when these customers move into a roaming environment, home service
providers are dependent on bilateral roaming contracts to provide the assured
level of service in visited networks. To to guarantee quality of service, it is
key that carriers have real-time control to influence the roaming experience of
their customers in visited networks.

Service Environment Surety

When customers move out of their home networks and travel into visited
networks, it is critical that they use networks that support some of the basic
services like GPRS/CAMEL, based on their home profile to enable continuous
availability of services. For example, a prepaid customers roams into a visited
network where there is access to multiple networks; however not all networks
have a CAMEL roaming arrangement with the home network. In such a situation its
critical that the home network is able to move the user to a CAMEL-enabled
roaming partner in real time to provide continuous services to the traveling
customer in the visited environment. A similar need arises for GPRS roaming
customers wherein it is critical to latch on to GPRS-enabled roaming partners in
the roamed environment. There is need for carriers to introduce applications
that would enable them to provide real-time assistance to their customers in a
roaming environment to ensure continuous availability of critical services.

Service Quality Assurance

When home customers move into roaming environments, the availability of
services is dependent on many factors including correct business configuration
in the visited networks, uptime of network elements, and error-free interconnect
protocols including signaling and voice trunks. In the real world, often some of
these dependencies break down causing service degradation for the visiting
customers. In such cases, it is critical that the home network takes
responsibility of real-time monitoring of service levels in the visited network.
There are advanced tools available by which home networks can monitor voice, SMS,
and data service quality experienced by their customers in the visited networks
remotely. There is an opportunity for carriers to deploy services that enable
real-time service quality monitoring for proactive response to service
degradation scenarios.

Roaming Cost Management

The single, biggest benefit that roaming service brings to the wireless
world is seamless functionality of applications. This also enables subscribers
to be reachable on a single number across continents. However the call setup and
charging principles result in the roaming transactions becoming expensive for
the callers and the receivers in a roaming environment. The reason being that
when a wireless customer moves into a roaming environment, and a local caller
from the visited networks tries to reach the roamer the caller ends up paying
visited location to the home network of the roamer, and the roamer pays for the
call tromboning from the home location to the visited location. This is inspite
of the fact that that the visited network does have the details to enable
routing of the call locally. Within the GSM standard there is a clear definition
of the optimal roaming standard, however for a plethora of reasons this is a
standard that has not been deployed by 99 percent of the networks worldwide.
While roaming is an extremely lucrative revenue stream for carriers, it is also
a very expensive service today vis-à-vis home network usage. There exists an
opportunity for carriers to introduce technologies that could reduce the roaming
costs and avoid the tromboning of calls-improving the quality of voice
service.

Virtual Home Environment

Today, carriers are introducing various services, to improve the convenience
for wireless customers. As part of this initiative, one of the most common
services have been short codes and name dialing. The objective being to provide
abbreviated dialing for frequently utilized services like voice mail, customer
care, directory service, travel services. In addition, the availability of name
dialing enables customers to reach certain services by just dialing the name,
e.g., to call American Express one could just dial AMEX 2639.

These services have reached a fair amount of maturity in the
home network environment. However they has not been deployed in roaming
environments given the non-standardized nature of roaming contracts and some
technology limitations. For customers roaming within the same standard, it is
reasonable to expect the same level of service in a visited environment, given
the fact that they are paying a premium vis-à-vis the home network. While there
is some adoption of these services within the GSM environment, the deployments
of these services are few, and there is an opportunity for the carriers to
create a virtual home environment across the GSM world map.

Real-Time Call Correction

Wireless customers who roam extensively have the challenge of dialing out
local numbers in various markets worldwide. The challenges involve differing
area codes, international access codes, changing local area codes, etc. The
usual response, when one dials an incorrect number in a visited network or even
in a home network, is that the number dialed is incorrect and that one needs to
check the number and dial again.

It's usually difficult for a wireless subscriber to figure
out the dialing mistakes. The opportunity available to carriers is to use the
information available on common dialing errors available from the database of
failed calls on MSCs, and to utilize those to provide a solution that would
enable call correction based on a common pool of errors. This service is
extremely critical given the fact that on an average 30 percent of mobile
outgoing calls in a wireless network fail for a variety of reasons, one of them
being incorrect numbers being dialed. This service provides an opportunity for
incremental revenue for the carrier by connecting a call that would otherwise
fail, and from a customer service perspective it provides great service by
providing a real-time call correction and eventual call completion.

Today in the wireless world, given the blistering growth that
we have experienced globally, the next challenge is to redefine the quality of
service across the wireless landscape. In this next wave of service enhancement,
opportunity awaits the carrier world to roll out services that would not just
increase revenues but also redefine the quality of service.

Abraham
Punnoose director, marketing and business development, Roamware