international roaming business

from roaming relationship opening to revenue increase

International roaming is an emerging market and a business driver for mobile operators. The stake is to combine revenue assurance and end user’s satisfaction.

Mobile roaming refers to the use of mobile devices outside a subscriber’s home network coverage area.

International roaming represents an emerging and very attractive market, even in a tariff regulation context. The value chain includes:

the Home operator (HPLMN(1)) owning the customer and the operator of the Visited country (VPLMN(2)),
the interconnection services providers (signalling, voice and data),
the clearing house, for inter-operator billing,
value added roaming services providers.

Stake : secure roaming revenue

for the home operator: optimise the ARPU,
for the visited operator: get an incremental revenue.

The roamer is sensitive to a good quality price ratio in the visited country. Roamer’s satisfaction is a key success factor for both operators and requires a coordinated effort. Agreement between HPLMN and VPLMN defines the terms:

on inter-operator tariff,
on the home operator’s ability to send roamers,
on end-to-end quality of service.

Increase the revenue by Value Added Services for the roamer

Making the tourist or the business traveller comfortable with his phone usage while roaming, like having a Virtual Home Environment (VHE(3)) improves roamer’s satisfaction and ensures the revenue.

A complete range of business roaming services

In a competitive environment, the guarantee of quality of service gives a significant advantage to the operator of the visited country. Sofrecom provides customised solutions to home and visited operators.

Establish a roaming relationship

Sofrecom assists the operator in its roaming footprint extension strategy and builds the technical relationship in accordance with standard tests from GSM association (IREG(4)) and TADIG(5)).

Steer the roaming business performance

To follow up the roaming performance, Sofrecom sets up a complete panel of technical indicators covering the whole network (access, core and interconnection).

Improve roaming capture

The performance of roamer’s capture by the network access requires an appropriate geomarketing approach. Mastering the roamer’s capture is essential to take the lead over competitors. The performance is assessed throughout specific indicators coming from drive tests. High performance tools are used for the measurement and post-processing.

Add value in services to the roamer

Roaming added value services such as location based contents, short codes and welcome SMS improve the customer’s experience. Assistance by Sofrecom can be provided in every stream line to implement the roaming value added services and guarantee the readiness: from the choice of the platform or the application to the integration.

(1) HPLMN = Home Public Land Mobile Network
(2) VPLMN = Visited Public Land Mobile Network
(3) VHE = Virtual Home Environment
(4) IREG = International Roaming Expert Group
(5)TADIG= Transferred Account Data Interchange Group


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