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Roaming Steering at Vodafone Qatar

The combined affects of falling mobile tariffs, cheap travel and increasingly itinerant populations has created a rich revenue stream for mobile operators. What was once the extremely useful, but very expensive preserve of the international business traveller, has become a regular feature for many mobile phone users. Whether you’re a pre or post-paid user, taking your annual vacation, a weekend break, visiting family, on a religious pilgrimage – whatever the reason – it no longer breaks the bank to make and receive phone calls and text messages when you are roaming. The mobile phone, previously carried in case of an emergency, is now being used regularly to call local taxis, book restaurants, find the rest of your travel party and call home.

Roaming revenues are increasing despite the downward pressure on tariffs from competition and regulatory scrutiny. There is money to be made from roaming. Increasingly, operators are investing in systems to ensure that their subscribers – when they roam – are steered to the network that optimises their revenues and margins.

When a subscriber roams, there are several networks that their phone can ‘see’ and use when they turn it on. Until recently, the phone would automatically select the best network on the basis of signal strength. Increasingly now, the home network operator can make intelligent decisions during the signalling that takes place between phone, visited network and home network, to authorise the phone, connect to the visited network and provide service.

Vodafone Qatar uses an OpenCloud Rhino-based roaming steering solution, to deliver an improved roaming experience to their subscribers. This ensures valuable roaming revenues are retained in the Vodafone group and optimises the revenues for Inter-Operator Tariff (IOT) agreements by monitoring and steering traffic so that contractual thresholds are met.