Mobile Roaming World Summit 2010

In its 18th year, Informa Telecoms & Media held the Mobile Roaming World Summit in London. It is attended by over 70 companies which more than half is operators.

Turkcell Technology’s participation

Turkcell Technology participated in this year’s event both as a sponsor and a speaker after couple of years of particiation as delegate. Instead of simply promoting one of our many products on a wide range of areas in telecommunications, we highlighted issues on traffic steering that are actually quite important to maximize the roaming revenues but still not all the operators are paying attention to.

It was specifically nice hearing quite positive feedbacks, both from operators and other vendors, about Turkcell Technology’s presence around the world and our products.

Topics discussed

Several different issues are presented and discussed during the summit, ranging from specific aspects of roaming business to trends in the GSM world in general. The increasing trend in data traffic and its implications to roaming business is highlighted by different speakers, including Informa analyst with numbers taken from their latest report on the issue. Some of the topics catching attention are summarized below.

EU Regulations

Like previous years, the EU regulations and its implications were one of the topics which many were interested in. As the decline in the prices was expected to be responded by big increase in the usage by the customers, there were different presentations showing that it is not happening like that. Yes, there was some increase in the traffic, but not that directly proportional with the decrease in the prices.

Roman Schneider from Swisscom supported this finding with numbers from their network, after they decreased the roaming prices seriously in the recent years as the market leader in Switzerland. Their main finding was that the competitors did not follow them to decrease the roaming prices and the traffic did not increase that much, maybe because only 20% of the subscribers were aware of this big price reduction even with huge marketing campaigns. Roman also noted that the EU regulations are effecting them in a bad way as being a non-EU operator, as the EU operators are charging them more.

Nick White, Executive Vice President of INTUG, International Telecommunications User Group; provided subscribers’ point of view. He mostly defended the idea that the roaming charges are not based on the cost and the regulations should be extended and there should not be a different roaming tariffs. As most of the participants were mobile network operators and the sector, it can easily be said that his view was not shared by most.

A delegate mentioned that in the real world price for most of the products and services are not based on the cost but value. GSM roaming is offering a very valuable and important service - good accessibility all around the world and it is normal that there is a different tariff for roaming. He used iPhone as example to support his view telling people are OK with paying relatively big amount of money compared to the cost of the handset as it offers good value to the customers.

Bill-shocks

Bill-shocks during roaming was another issue highlighted by many, telling that subscribers do find it extremely expensive and the reaction of most of them was trying to find out how to disable roaming features on their handset as soon as they land. An example given by Stephen Ornadel, Head of Carrier Services from Everything Everywhere (ex T-Mobile) was about 13000 pounds of bill after the kids were using data during roaming to watch a single episode of Friends.

Stephen noted that customers have three simple expectations, Control (no surprises), Information (how much do I have left and how to turn it off) and Fair Price (customers understand that roaming may cost more). Stephen talked about T-Mobile’s Euro Internet Booster telling how it addresses all these requirements. It is actually like a set of prepaid data packages selected by the subscriber, which is the only way to use data while roaming. When the package is over you have no data access though it easily can be purchased again. The prices were not that low but still might be better than prices for Wifi at the hotels.

Unfortunately, these packages are only for EU zone and for the rest of the world neither the control nor the attractive prices are available to the subscriber. Still many agreed that these packages are a good way to prevent bill-shocks. T-Mobile noted that these packages could be made available with some big investment in their network, originally intended for national market only.

Other topics

Just like in the previous years, hubbing and solutions from companies offering different SIM solutions to get rid of roaming charges were discussed. Besides these, another topic was LTE. Peter Bergman’s presentation as a case study for TeliaSonera’s LTE roll-out attracted a lot of attention as it is the first LTE implementation. Peter noted that the subscribers were provided 3G-4G combo modems to fall back to 3G, as mostly central locations were covered with LTE.