Getting more out of data roaming traffic

To stimulate usage while abroad, operators are offering aggressive roaming retail tariffs to their subscribers which are supported by negotiated IOT from partners. Because of flat rate retail tariff for a country and little margins, it is more important than ever to keep the steering effective to keep the costs under control.

Especially for data which has relatively higher IOT, the difference between the negotiated and regular IOT could be so high that even a small percentage of traffic loss to an unpreferred partner may mess all the business of your “ aggressive retail campaign”.

To achieve this, operators are working hard to tune their steering systems or support network based steering systems with SIM-based steering systems. As the loss of traffic to unpreferred partner is more serious for data traffic because of high difference of IOT for data, we need more than tuning the existing steering solutions.

Steering systems should be aware of data-heavy or data-only terminals and handle them with different settings, different preferred operator or in a more aggressive way. While the data-only terminals can be detected easily (no UpdateLocation but only GPRS UpdateLocation messages) by network-based steering systems, it is not possible for them to detect smart phones as not all the partners can send the IMEI information in the registration messages. This leads to using operator databases for subscriber - terminal type mapping which can let you know who is using a smartphone.

The definition for smartphone can be slightly different for everyone. From the data traffic perspective, we're more likely to be interested in the recent generation of smartphones with big screens and easy to use interfaces boosting data usage.

The ability to know which outbound roamer is using a smartphone may not be enough alone itself, as not all smartphone users are data-hungry subscribers. Checking their local and roaming usage history could be priceless to detect data-heavy roamers which we want to steer to our partners with negotiated data IOT.

Informa predicts that revenues from mobile data roaming will increase by a massive 246% between 2010 and 2015. With the growing trend of regulating roaming business more strictly, operators are working on data roaming business more to be able to compensate the losses.