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.

GSM positioning myths (or operators’ positioning solutions)

“Operators know –without any effort— where all subscribers are at any time with historical information”

Not just the subscribers but even some of the GSM operator employees have this idea. They even may base some ideas / solutions on this wrong assumption. But yes; as most are aware, this is a wrong statement.

Operators can determine the location of a subscriber, but not in a 1-meter precision. Worse, this has to be on demand, meaning you have to query the network for this information. Besides, this query has an impact on radio resources so that there is an upperbound on the number of concurrent queries on the network in a technically feasible way (in other words, letting subscribers to be able to talk).

In this post, we’ll go over the most common network based positioning solutions deployed on the GSM networks and their precision. Please note that not all the methods are discussed here, but only the most common ones. There are higher precision solutions than the ones described here, but most are not financially feasible requiring serious hardware investment. They are rarely used unless it is mandated by the regulatories. Below, the solutions are grouped in the way they are accessed or operating.


Mobile Termination Location Request (MT-LR)

Solutions in this category are queried to check the position of the subscriber on the network on demand. They query different nodes on the network to collect the position information and return the result to the service triggering the query.

MPS might be the most known solution in the category. Its accuracy is better than cell level, as it can return a slice of the cell with the calculation of the subscriber’s distance to the antenna.

If the antenna is serving only to a specific range of 360 degrees area, this results as an arc for the position of the subscriber. The ellipsoid arc is specified with the coordinates of the antenna, the inner/outer radius and start/stop angles. While the depth of the arc is about 550 meters (for 2G) in general, the size of the area depends on the antenna angles and the distance to the antenna. So the size of the arc can be >550m wide area for the downtown areas, but it can be a couple of kilometers for the rural.

As the distance to the antenna is calculated with time advance (Ta) information on the GSM network, this positioning method is also referred as CGI+TA method too. As this method requires active paging of the subscriber, it consumes some radio resource during the operation. As the radio resource is a quite valuable and limited resource for the GSM networks, it is clear how “expensive” the positioning in terms of both license and radio resources. Besides being expensive, the radio capacity introduces limits on how many positioning queries you can perform on a single cell.

CGI based positioning is another alternative in this category. Compared to CGI+TA, it provides a coarser area using only the serving cell ID of the subscriber. While the uncertainity area is as big as the cell itself, it is adequate for most of the 3rd party services. GSM vendors state that this method provides almost the same precision with CGI+TA method in the cities. CGI of the subscriber can be queried from the network without consuming the valuable radio resources but this will return the last CGI which the subscriber made any activity (mobile originated (MO) / terminated (MT) call/sms or data) or performed location area change. Alternatively, subscriber can be paged before the query to find out the active CGI of the subscriber.


Network Induced Location Request (NI-LR)

This platform works on the CGI+TA level. The main difference within them is that NI-LR does not need to be pulled for positioning. As it is intended for emergency calls, it queries the location of the call originator and pushes this information to a specific node on the network for each emergency call. Another pro of this method is that it can provide the location of the SIM-less subscribers making emergency call too.


Monitoring based systems

The solutions described above are active nodes, exchanging messages and consuming resources on the network. Considering messages are exchanged on the network for the mobility of the subscriber, one can consider monitoring these messages to be able to extract location information. This kind of working has the benefit of low effect on the network and ability of knowing all subscribers’ location at a time.

Here we have feasibility issues in terms of number of (and cost) monitoring probes and the amount of data processed. For a huge network, it is not financially feasible to monitor every single cell (BSC/BTS). Because of this, most operators monitor MSC-BSC communication (A-interface) only. At this level, Cell ID of subscribers is visible only for those performing any MO/MT activity or changing the “location area”.

Location area is a virtual concept, used to group a number of cells together to reduce the signalling cost. That’s why passive subscribers changing cells are not visible on this level, as long as they stay in the same location area. Based on this information, it is clear that the precision of such monitoring system is at “location area” scale. It may return cell level information but this information is the first cell the subscriber enters the location area, but not his active cell ID.


In short

With all the information above, we can sort the positioning solutions ordered with their precision as CGI+TA >> CGI >> A-interface monitoring.

Operators can locate the subscriber, but only within an area which is not small and varied depending on the area. Also, it is not possible to locate all subscribers at a time at the moment.

Finally, to comfort the subscribers, I have to note that most GSM operators are taking the subscriber privacy as serious issue and perform positioning only if the subscriber or the legal authorities (like emergency call cases) asks for it.

Sponsored networks and outbound roamer steering

There are different solutions allowing small operators to be able to inter-operate with quite large number of partner operators without the need of individual interworking agreements. Such solutions enable the new operators a global coverage with the support of the sponsor network.

Both sponsored and sponsor networks employ some products (which some might be called as roaming replicator), to make the message originated from sponsored network look like it is sponsor network’s traffic. Sponsor network route the traffic for the sponsored network properly too, which allows the sponsored network to access all the partners of the sponsor network.

As shown in the figure, when a subscriber attempts to camp to a network which receives service from a sponsor network, the registration request arrives from sponsor network to the HPLMN HLR. As the replicator products change both SCCP calling and VLR addresses with IMSI, from the point of HPLMN the subscriber is like being abroad in sponsor network country.

Issues with steering
Operators may prefer their outbound roamers to register to certain operators even though they may have roaming agreements with many operators in the same country. The motivation of having “preferred” partners can be cost (having discounts) or technical reasons (like better Camel / data support).

Steering solutions determine the country of the outbound roamer and try to steer the subscriber to a preferred partner using different methods. While one of the methods is network based steering which intercepts the subscribers’ registration messages, another method is SIM based steering which updates the preferred list of the subscriber’s SIM properly for the country.

For the sponsored network as the VPLMN, the HPLMN believes that the subscriber is trying to register to sponsor network actually. Besides this confusion, concluding the subscriber is at another country (Country Y instead of X) is a worse problem. There might be different settings for two countries and if the parameters are looser for the sponsor network’s country, this will cause problems for you.

The sponsor network might be a preferred partner and this prevents you to steer the subscriber to the preferred partners in country X. This may not be a problem if the sponsor network is “more preferred” than your preferred partners in the sponsored network’s country. But for the other case, this may mean that you lose some revenue.

Even though the sponsor network is more preferred than any preferred partner in the sponsored network’s country, you still should fix this case with configuration of the steering solution; to be able to retrieve correct reports grouped by countries.

Solution
Sponsor networks let the partners know about the sponsored network in general. They may publish the sponsorship as well the GT prefix for the VLRs used for that sponsored network. What you should do is to look for such publications from partner networks and alter the settings for your steering solution.

You will possibly need to create a new network to represent the sponsored network with the published GT range from the sponsor network's GT range. Considering your steering solutions allows that, then you should assign this new created network to the country / zone of the sponsored network.

With such setting, you will be able to correctly perform steering configuration for both sponsor and sponsored networks' countries. As roaming business is a considerable part of the revenues of the operators, having correct steering settings can be crucial to keep the costs minimized.

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.

Ericsson's Telecom Report on online / mobile games

From Ericsson's Telecom Report:

But a significant trend is happening: Online games for free. How does a business model work when the user pays nothing?
...
"The trends in our industry are multiple, there are games that are going to be free to play, so to say, you can download them for free, play them. we have a couple of those already up and running. and then we are looking to get a smaller part of the player base to start paying for bits and pieces of extra content basically in that game."
...
But free games on social media sites are proving to be a hit.

"If you're looking at it from a gamer perspective, social media, is I think goint to turn into one of the main distribution channel. so you will see a lot of the gams including some of the ones that we have launched recently have links into some of the sites like Facebook"
...
Selling 5 million games on a console, like Xbox or Sony Playstation is considered to be a great success. But it compares nothing to companies like Zynga who have free games on social media sites like Facebook and attract over 100 million users every month. Games such a Farmville, Yoville, Petville and many more are free to use, but encourage the gamers to buy, swap, send gifts and attend different activities thourhgou the course of their experience. experiences that can be played on both the fixed computer and mobile devices.

"In say five years time it could be a market where there are five hundred million smartphones being sold per annum with an install base of maybe one to one and a half billion smartphones."

"I mean that is the largest addressable market for hardware worldwide. Mobile games, worldwide about 5.5 billion dollars at the moment. forecasted to doubel over the next three or four years, so a ten billion dollar mark. a lot of that growth is coming from the smartphones."

 

Global mobile data traffic surpassed voice during December of 2009

From telecoms.com:

Global mobile data traffic surpassed voice during December of 2009, after growing 280 per cent during each of the last two years. According to Swedish vendor Ericsson, which published the figures, global mobile data traffic is forecast to double annually over the next five years.

Ericsson said that the crossover occurred at approximately 140,000 Terabytes per month in both voice and data traffic, while traffic on 3G networks also surpassed that of 2G networks.