Ensuring Enhanced Services for International Roamers

Over the past 10 years, deregulation and the introduction of VoIP have led to the emergence of hundreds of wholesale carriers and a 75 percent reduction in the cost of international calls. That is the good news.

The bad news is that the quality and feature transparency of these carriers’ networks is less than acceptable for many applications. This leaves wireless operators with significant challenges in delivering basic and enhanced services to subscribers who are roaming. As a result, operators lose potential revenue, and their high-end, premium subscribers get less than satisfactory service.

For example, when international travelers receive a call, instead of getting the caller ID for an incoming or missed call, they get worthless digits. They are thus forced to make unneeded costly calls to their voice mailbox, only to find that they have to reenter their phone numbers (wasting more valuable time), since the system doesn’t recognize them. Then, the ultimate frustration, travelers do not receive their voicemail messages. Yet when they return home, they face complaints that they could not be reached because the voicemail system required the caller to reenter the phone number—but because today’s phones so conveniently store numbers, nobody bothers to remember them.

A primary cause of these problems lies with the wholesale VoIP carriers. One of the long chain of intermediate carriers that the wholesaler has engaged between the originating and terminating mobile carriers has dropped or modified a field in the Caller Line Identifier (CLID)—the phone number of the person who initiated the call—before it gets to the called party. This makes the caller unrecognizable to the subscriber’s home network when he or she is roaming, and the carrier cannot ensure the quality of the call or the integrity of the call information. Subscribers soon learn that checking voicemail is painful at best and sometimes impossible, and thus make fewer calls of shorter duration when they are roaming.

Actually, the disappearance of the caller ID is just the one problem. A great deal of other information must follow each mobile call, and wireless operators use the signaling network to ensure that such essential information remains with the call. This information identifies payment method, authorized and blocked services, special features and who the user is—essential information operators need to accurately provide, access and bill new services.

Since wireless operators are looking at targeted offers and value-added services to fuel the growth engine, they need to be able to offer these services wherever the subscriber is, on or off the network. It is thus vital for operators to ensure that essential call information remains intact and linked to the call.

Historically wireless operators have depended on the wholesale market to complete calls to whatever networks around the world their subscribers want to reach. Although operators need to take control of their connections with other networks, they do not have—and do not want to add—the staff required to establish, manage and maintain high-quality bilateral agreements with all of these networks. Nevertheless, they need to ensure that intermediate wholesale carriers maintain the integrity of essential call information so they can provide services wherever their subscribers roam.

Direct Connections Are Key

The key to call integrity is establishing direct connections with terminating network providers—and eliminating the wholesale intermediary. This approach is not new; international calling began with agreements among AT&T, BT, France Telecom and the other major international correspondents. It is likely that each wireless operator already has a number of direct connections to a small subset of high-traffic routes. However, these connections are expensive to maintain and operate—too expensive to extend to all of the networks that require direct connections.

Yet now that VoIP is playing an increasing role in international calling, supplementing or replacing expensive traditional TDM-based connections, a wireless operator can establish one-to-one VoIP peering relationships—virtual direct connections—with any other operator. With the proper agreements, an operator can establish high-quality connections that preserve the integrity of the call information. In fact, carrying the CLID unaltered (and possibly reconstructing it for the home network) is a growing requirement for international carriers.

Although VoIP peering enables high-quality direct connections without major capital outlays, other issues need to be considered. What if one of the networks the operator wants to connect to is not VoIP-enabled or uses a variant of VoIP, and thus requires protocol conversion and management?

Managed VoIP Peering Solves Roaming Issues

By engaging a company that provides managed VoIP peering, the wireless operator can reap the benefits of high-quality direct connections—even to emerging markets such as Latin America—without major capital outlays and without changing its business processes. The operator should be able to obtain a service level agreement that ensures the integrity of the call information and also set up the requisite financial relationships, such as billing, collection and settlement services.

With managed VoIP peering, operators can provide their subscribers with caller ID. When users roam internationally, they will be able to access their voicemail just as if they were at home, and callers will be directed to subscribers’ voicemail without having to reenter their phone numbers. In addition, support for other value-added services such as virtual private networks (VPNs) opens the way for a vast array of profitable new services.

Wireless operators can use managed VoIP peering to establish direct connections to any network—whether it is VoIP-enabled or not, and whether it uses the same VoIP protocol or not. And because managed VoIP peering requires no change in business practices, the connections between network operators are cost-effective, high quality and feature-rich.

Gary Tauss is President and CEO of InfiniRoute Networks Inc. InfiniRoute Networks provides fully managed VoIP peering services for wireline and wireless carriers who need PSTN-quality VoIP connections to high-growth traffic regions worldwide. For more information go to www.infiniroute.com.