Outbound Roamer Steering - Mobile Data Boost

The introduction of iPhone boosted the smartphone market as well as mobile data usage. Informa reports that by 2013 there will be one billion smartphones in use, thanks to iPhone and Google’s Android operating system. Each year, both the number of smartphones and their share in total number of handsets is increasing. Tablet computers (again triggered by Apple’s iPad) are another gadget pushing the mobile data usage a step further. According to Gartner, tablet sales will surpass 200 million by 2014.

Both smartphones and tablets consume a huge amount of mobile data, increasing the share of data revenues for operators. In parallel to this trend, Informa predicts that revenues from mobile data roaming will increase by a massive 246% between 2010 and 2015.

Within the context of the previous post, we have to pay special attention to data with our outbound roamer steering solutions.

Ensuring smartphones’ proper work on the network

As smartphones are becoming such an important part of the roaming business, we need to ensure that service is as seamless for them as it is for regular handsets. Unfortunately, the behavior of some smartphones can be different from regular phones as they are designed to be something more than just “phones”.

An example can be some specific models’ failure to interact with network-based steering solutions. Unlike the plain handsets they may accept having only data connection without any voice connection, resulting them to be stuck in a condition where the subscriber is not reachable for any calls or SMSs. Worse, this condition is not visible to the subscriber unless he tries to make a call. Although the solution to this problem can be as easy as enabling steering of GPRS messages, without such a care we’ll end up with unhappy customers and loss of potential revenues.

Segmentation

In the old times where the GSM traffic and revenues consisted of voice and SMS mainly, outbound roamers were tried to be redirected to cheaper voice partners. While this is still the case for most of the subscribers, with the increasing data traffic share we have to make sure data-heavy subscribers are redirected to the cheaper data partners. Steering systems segment the outbound roamers normally as prepaid, postpaid or VIP subscribers and treat them differently, but now we need a separate segment for data-heavy subscribers.

The question here is how to determine the data-heavy subscribers. Billing system integration is a proper option allowing the steering system to check the roaming history of the subscriber to determine if he’s a data- or voice-heavy subscriber. For the cases where the steering system does not support this kind of integration or operator cannot provide such an interface, checking the device database (IMEI) for the subscriber could be another option. Although this works on the assumption that all smartphone users are data-heavy subscribers, this is still better than doing nothing. And it can work properly for the terminals like data modems.