Executive Briefing Notes
 In this section we offer a series of briefing notes. These, business orientated notes, are intended to give a basic introduction to the subjects covered. So if you are invited to, for example, attend a meeting on mobile roaming virtual home environment, and you need to get up to speed quickly, this section may be able to help you.
Steering of Roaming: A Key Roaming Management Tool
By Robin Burton
Steering of roaming, or “preferred roaming”, is the process by which a mobile operator decides which partner their subscribers will use whilst roaming.
These choices are usually exercised to take advantage of better prices from partners or to allow bi-lateral agreements with partners to be honoured. Increasingly, due to the “network crunch” caused by exploding data usage, they can also be used to select partners based on quality concerns.
Today there are two main methods in use: network based and SIM based steering. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Some operators will use both approaches together.
To read the full briefing note, click here.
Anti-Steering of Roaming: A Cause of Missed Revenue Targets
By Robin Burton
Steering of roaming, as discussed in another briefing note, is a valuable tool that enables you to manage your relationships with your roaming partners effectively and dynamically. In today’s market it is a vital tool which helps you to control costs and manage quality for your roaming partners.
Naturally, those roaming partners whom you do not select, because of high cost or low quality, find that this activity represents a loss of revenue for them. Consequently they are tempted to interfere with the steering process. This interference can be called “anti-steering of roaming” or, sometimes, "roaming retention". It is often first suspected when steering targets are not met by the steering platform.
The Virtual Home Environment: Making Roamers Feel At Home
By Robin Burton
Now, more than ever before, it makes sense to do all that you can to maximise roaming revenue. One way is to implement a “virtual home environment” or “VHE”. This is a collection of applications that make phone use whilst roaming as simple as possible. It can be implemented for either inbound roamers, outbound roamers or both.
The principle function of a VHE is the automatic correction of miss-dialled numbers. This might include, for example, someone dialling directly from their phone book and not realising that they need to dial an international access code and drop the first digit before the number. Or it might mean someone dialling a short code to access, for example, their voice mail. Subsidiary functions include messaging to keep the customer informed about issues such as roaming costs or how to get help whilst roaming, and optimal routing to reduce unnecessary costs for callers accessing voice mail.
To read the full briefing note, click here.
SS7 Based SMS Fraud: A Growing ThreatBy Robin Burton
There are a number of known methods of committing SS7 (signalling network) SMS fraud
These include:
- Spoofing of subscribers
- Flooding of messages
- Spam messages
- SMSC Global Title scanning
- Faking of originating PLMN
To read the full briefing note, click here.
Dynamic Cell Based Tariffing (Intelligent Pricing): Sweating Your Network Assets
By Robin Burton
On any weekday over the 24 hour period for a typical operator more than 80% of the available radio network capacity is wasted! Dynamic Cell Based Tariffing is a system designed to help operators get more use from this unused capacity. It also helps to boost ARPU from lower income subscribers and to offer a viable service for very low income subscribers.
Voice Mail Tromboning: An Unnecessary Cost to the Business
By Robin Burton
Tromboning is a phenomenon that occurs when someone calls a roaming subscriber who is unavailable. The call is routed to the network currently being visited by the subscriber. On finding that the subscriber is unavailable, the call is then routed back to the home network and on to voice mail. The effect is very similar if the subscriber has chosen to forward calls to another number.
This therefore establishes a circuit with two international legs to terminate a call where the originating and end point may be in the same country.
SS7 Analysis: Critical Information for your Roaming Business
By Robin Burton
Most operators today carry out in depth analyses of the TAP records that they receive. These give a view of the business that the operator has won and how it is varying over time. This is clearly very useful. However it does not give you a full picture of what is going on.
To see why, let’s consider an analogy...
Border Roaming: A Source of Unnecessary Cost and Subscriber Dissatisfaction
By Robin Burton
Border roaming issues have been receiving a lot of attention recently in the press in a number of countries. Most notably this has been seen on the USA / Canada border and on the Portuguese / Spanish border.
Border roaming is a term that can be used to cover a number of issues. Generally there are three main scenarios to be aware of:
• Accidental / unintended roaming
• Retained returning surface travellers
• National roaming
To read the full briefing note, click here
Welcome SMS: A simple communications channel between you and your roaming subscribersBy Robin Burton
A welcome SMS message is, quite simply, an SMS message that is sent to a roamer when they first log on to a new network. Most welcome SMS messages are sent to advise roamers of the costs of making calls. Originally this was because regulators, such as the EU, insisted on it as a way of combatting price shock
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