Improving Roaming Revenues

India's Bharti Telesoft says that it has implemented its RoamRetainer solution for a major Middle Eastern operator, to extend inbound roamers' life on the network. On an average, international roamers stay on a visited network for three days. But in this duration the roamer's phone may automatically switch on to a competitor network. This largely occurs in areas where the visited operator's network signal is relatively weaker than the competitor network's signal.

Bharti Telesoft has found that roamers flip-flop between networks 4-5 time a day. Thereby the revenues from calls and SMS initiated by the inbound roamer get distributed over multiple operator sites. RoamRetainer plugs involuntary migration and ensures roamers stay on the same visited network for the entire duration of their stay. This plugs revenue loss from involuntary churn and significantly improves revenues for the visited operator.

Bharti Telesoft says that this particular network operator in the Middle East experienced a 20% increase in the average roamer's lifetime on the network - in just one month. In the same period roaming revenues have increased by over 10%.

When an inbound roamer attempts to latch on to a different network, the RoamRetainer solution intercepts cancel location procedures between the visited and home networks. RoamRetainer seamlessly 'pulls' inbound roamers back to the network on to which they are currently latched, while rejecting attempts to latch on to other networks.

Sanjiv Mital, Chief Executive Officer at Bharti Telesoft commented, "Roaming is a high revenue and high margin part of every operator's portfolio and we recognize that maintaining and growing roaming revenues is a priority. We developed RoamRetainer to help operators keep roaming customers on the network, especially in the face of growing competition from partner alliances and we are pleased to see that RoamRetainer is living up to its name in the Middle East."


http://www.cellular-news.com/story/18585.php

So they fake the reregistration of the roaming cell phone back onto their network? That sounds like fraud to me.

Exactly... I had the same impression... I don't like this system, I think it's against the final customer.

Well, this is clear thanks to Bharti's CEO: "Roaming is a high revenue and high margin part of every operator's portfolio and we recognize that maintaining and growing roaming revenues is a priority." Money, only money.

I get the strong impression that my Vodafone SIM likes Vodafone networks but does occasionally roam on to others. Likewise, the CallKey SIM spends more time on O2 networks in UK and Germany than the rest combined.

And, er, oops. We keep reading all the PR bollocks about competition improving roaming tariffs. Just occasionally the truth slips out

Yes. But the difference is (at least for germany)
If my Vodafone SIM roams in vodafone-Networks i get cheaper rates than on the others (passport option), if my o2 SIM roams on o2 networks i get cheaper rates as well (starmap alliance)...

But if they force the cards in their network they just want to milk the cow even more.

Chris

I agree that it is fraud. One arguable reason to go with roaming over a prepaid in a given country is to have the super coverage that you should get if you choose to pay roaming rates.

Let's say I am a variable rate roaming customer and my cheapest roaming solution is carrier Y. At some time during the day, I don't have coverage and go to carrier Z to make a needed call. If I read this correctly, I could no longer force a manual registration on carrier Y because carrier Z would keep forging my reregistration signal. Also imagine what will happen if both Carrier Z and Carrier Y both subscribe to this stupid service. I'll be the victim of a tug of war. At some point, my carrier might catch me on two seperate networks at the same time, determine that some sort of fraud is going on and blacklist my SIM when I am 1000km from home

I was in Ireland last week. I crossed back and forth between NI and the Republic. Let's assume that I had a SIM from the Republic and briefly went into NI for lunch and didn't disable my voicemail. Now, I return to the Republic register on my home carrier, get fraudulently reregistered to an NI carrier, and then a call goes to voicemail. I will get hit for a roundtrip roaming call to my the NI carrier and then back to voicemail.

You can set a carrier as a preferred carrier on your SIM. When I lived in the US, I had unlimited roaming on Rogers in Canada. You can do it as well as your carrier with some phones or SIM software. I'm tempted to make a blacklist of these carriers that use the roaming solution.

It is interesting that the press release quoted above refers to the Middle Eastern carrier without naming them. Clearly, they don't want to take the PE hit.