When National Mobile Roaming becomes a conflict of Interest
Mobile Operators are constantly looking to enhance their network coverage in order to attract more subscribers and increase customer satisfaction. These enhancements, however, can be both time consuming and costly pushing Operators towards National Roaming Partner agreements in order to provide better network coverage. By having these agreements in place, Operators are able to provide service to their subscribers in geographic areas they currently cannot reach or are commercially impractical.
Although this can be a beneficial solution for mobile operators, it can cause a conflict of interest in some of their serving areas. Described below is a challenge that one of our clients faced recently and requested Cellusys to implement a solution for this problem:
Our client is a major operator in a large country, which has put in place multiple national roaming agreements with other national operators in order to provide better network coverage to its subscribers.
They noticed that their national roaming partners were expanding their network coverage to overlap their home network coverage area either by adding more base stations or increasing transmission power. This greatly increased the chance of their subscribers registering on the roaming partner’s network even when they are in the home network coverage area. This has resulted in millions of dollars in lost revenue every month to our client.
National roaming agreements tend to be revenue share by nature and require great attention by the home operator on controlling their subscriber roaming activities. Failing to pay attention to this can cause the home operator to face significant revenue losses while their national roaming partners profit significantly.
Basically operators need to control their subscribers roaming activities when moving around following coverage areas.
- Home Network Coverage Area Only
- Home/Roaming Partner Coverage Area
- Roaming Partner Coverage Area Only
Operators can successfully achieve this by incorporating the Cellusys National Steering System into their network which prevents subscribers from registering on the national roaming partner’s network where there is coverage overlap and re-directing them to the home network when the home network becomes available again. In a nutshell Cellusys National Steering enables the home operator to gain control of their subscribers when roaming in partner’s network coverage to ensure that the national roaming partners are only utilised where needed.
Cellusys has implemented National steering successfully for several operators worldwide to help them visualise their national roaming landscape and minimise revenue loss to their national roaming partners.