Pricing caps and increased competition drive operators to analyse data roaming traffic, improve quality and fine tune service offerings
BICS, an international wholesale partner to over 400 mobile operators worldwide, is launching Smart Webvision, a product for the monitoring, tracking, tracing and reporting of roaming traffic on SS7 Signalling. In addition it will support LTE Diameter, LTE Data and GPRS Roaming Exchange network (GRX) technologies. The Smart Webvision solution is an easy to use roaming, monitoring, tracking, tracing and business intelligence tool. It allows mobile network operators, mobile virtual network operators, and roaming service providers to make intelligent business decisions based on analysis of subscriber behaviour, usage trends and network performance.
Smart stands for Subscriber Management and Advanced Reporting Tool, the analytics it produces enables operators to modify their data roaming service proposition and develop new tariffs to counteract pricing caps and drive additional revenues from international roaming. The solution also provides information to support targeted marketing and promotion campaigns. BICS is launching a series of modules designed to monitor, measure, track, trace and analyse operator roaming traffic. This will allow operators to optimise the roaming experience and boost revenues from roaming over 2G, 3G, and 4G.
This service will address some of the crucial concerns operators have about roaming. It can assess a range of different issues, identifying and tracking how much roaming traffic is currently on the network, which services subscribers are using and their location.
From an infrastructure perspective it can identify if the network is experiencing any SS7, LTE, or GRX interconnection problems and the quality of service delivered to each end user. From a revenue management and service assurance perspective it can identify revenue leakage and if the capacity roadmap is aligned with forecasts. Mikaël Schachne, VP mobile data business at BICS, said: 'Mobile data roaming revenues will grow significantly over the next five years, mainly driven by an increasing usage of data services by subscribers travelling abroad. Operators are acutely aware of this evolution and are looking at different ways to monitor inbound and outbound roaming traffic on different technologies and levels.
'Ultimately they want to guarantee the quality of the user roaming experience, anticipate traffic changes and define the right roaming strategy. Roaming price caps and new legislation that will open up the market to specialist roaming providers has created a need for operators to introduce tiered service offerings with different pricing options,' Schachne added. Continuing, he said: 'Smart will give operators a 360 degree view on their roaming business enabling them to fine tune their roaming strategy. Based on figures they can improve the quality of the roaming experience, but also add an entirely new dimension to data roaming with the availability of new pricing options dependent on speed, for example. Operators can begin to offer a range of standard and premium services to cater for different subscriber needs for both business customers and consumers. Intelligence provided by SMART will enable operators to maintain quality and speed for premium customers in an area where there is limited bandwidth.'
