With over 100,000 multinational corporations worldwide, seamless connectivity is an absolute essential, not just a mere convenience. International roaming for business helps businesses ensure that their teams and clients are connected, no matter where they are. However, conventional roaming comes with high costs and limited flexibility, presenting challenges for businesses and operators alike.
This blog post explores the concept of international roaming for businesses, highlighting how mobile and landline operators can leverage it to create a win-win scenario, benefiting both themselves and their customers.
What is International Roaming for Business?
Often referred to as Business Roaming, it enables users traveling outside their home country to maintain seamless connectivity. They can access mobile communication services, including voice, SMS, and data, while in a foreign location.
International roaming services for businesses are specifically meant for:
- Global business travelers, i.e. users who travel internationally for business purposes
- Companies with international operations, such as organizations with offices, clients, and partners in multiple regions across the world
- Businesses with distributed workforces, i.e., where users work from remote locations across the globe
What is the Importance of International Roaming for Business?
The significance of international roaming for businesses lies in its ability to facilitate real-time collaboration, ensuring seamless communication while roaming internationally. This enables seamless operations as users remain connected for coordination and decision-making. Moreover, companies with international operations can remain available to their customers, no matter where they are. Providing consistent and reliable communication increases the trust of the customers.
Additionally, with seamless international connectivity while traveling, users can stay productive. They can use their time productively by attending meetings, responding to emails, and collaborating on projects without waiting to return to their home country network.
Furthermore, international roaming ensures that users have access to critical business information while traveling. They can stay updated on the latest trends, competitor activities, and other important developments while on the go.
If a globally operating business still hesitates to leverage international roaming services, they’re missing a crucial opportunity. By embracing international roaming services, they can cultivate stronger relationships with international clients and partners.
Key Components of International Roaming
To effectively utilize international roaming services, it’s essential to understand a few key aspects. Let’s explore them:
- Roaming Charges
These are the charges or fees that businesses incur when they use roaming services. For example, when users travel abroad and use calls, SMS, and data services. These charges usually vary depending upon multiple factors, including the destination country, type of services used, etc.
- Roaming Plans
These are prepaid and postpaid packages offered by network providers enabling mobile users to use their phones abroad at a reduced cost. Usually, roaming plans are available in different types, such as per-pay-use, daily/weekly/monthly plans, etc. Businesses can choose a plan depending upon their specific requirements.
For mobile network operators, international business roaming primarily revolves around the following components:
- Roaming Contracts
These are the agreements that MNOs in different regions have with each other. Typically, these contracts include the technical and commercial terms of the roaming service, such as service quality levels, pricing, or charges of roaming services, etc.
- Network Infrastructure
Operators also need to invest in compatible and interoperable network infrastructure, which includes both logical and physical components of mobile networks. Typically, this includes base stations, core networks, and signaling systems to ensure seamless roaming between various networks.
- Subscriber Management
Another important aspect for which operators are responsible is the management of subscriber data. This generally includes managing roaming profiles of subscribers, service entitlements, and usage information.
- Billing and Settlement
MNOs also need to ensure customer service support services for roaming subscribers. Travelers often have questions about roaming charges and technical issues, which MNOs need to answer.
- Customer Support
Network operators also need to ensure customer service support services for roaming subscribers. Travelers often have questions about roaming charges and technical issues, which MNOs need to answer.
Latest Industry Trends in International Roaming
- High Demand for Data Roaming
According to GSMA, mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 23% between 2023 and 2030, reaching more than 465 exabytes (EB) per month by the end of the decade. The increasing use of data-intensive applications like video streaming, cloud services, and social media is driving this surge in data usage.
- The Growth of IoT Connectivity
The IoT roaming market is expected to grow significantly, with global IoT connections projected to reach 25 billion by 2025. The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly expanding, with billions of connected devices generating massive amounts of data. IoT roaming presents new revenue opportunities for operators as they provide connectivity for a growing number of connected devices.
- Regulatory Changes
Regulatory interventions, including ‘Roam Like at Home‘ policies and price caps, are being enforced globally to enhance the affordability of international roaming services. These measures, while beneficial to consumers, present a significant challenge to operator profitability.
- Virtual Roaming Solutions Gaining Traction
Virtual roaming solutions are emerging as a cost-effective and scalable alternative to traditional roaming infrastructure. These solutions eliminate the need for expensive physical roaming agreements.
Challenges of Traditional Roaming Infrastructure
Before we learn about the challenges of traditional roaming, let’s take a look at some figures that highlight the decline in roaming revenue:
- When COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, operators witnessed a sharp decline in the subscriber count due to travel restrictions. Kaleido Intelligence’s Roaming Data Hub – Q4 2020 research found that the Coronavirus impact on travel resulted in a decline of consumer roaming revenues by 64% in 2020, with Asia-Pacific and Europe witnessing the greatest level of depreciation amongst global regions.
- The GSMA found that roaming was one of the four key areas of telecom revenues that were impacted by COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021.
- In 2017, the EU introduced the “Roam Like at Home” policy, which eliminated additional roaming charges on users using calls, texts and data services while traveling abroad. This implementation impacted operators’ revenues significantly.
- Expensive Agreements and High-Cost Infrastructure Requirements
Maintaining roaming agreements with numerous foreign operators involves complex negotiations and high upfront investments, which lead to significant operator costs. Besides expensive agreements, operators also need to invest in maintaining and upgrading roaming infrastructure. Setting up signaling systems and core network elements for home and visited networks requires operators to invest substantially. The high cost of roaming agreements and expensive infrastructure investments, in turn, result in high roaming charges to subscribers, which often negatively impacts customer satisfaction.
- Complexity in Managing Multiple Roaming Agreements
It’s not just one but a multitude of bilateral roaming agreements that operators need to manage, which is a complex and time-consuming process. Also, managing technical integration and interoperability between different network technologies across borders presents several technical hurdles. Furthermore, operators need to ensure accurate billing and settlement of roaming charges between multiple operators, which again is quite a challenging task.
- Risk of service downtime or poor call quality in different countries
Limitations of the foreign networks in terms of infrastructure, traffic management, and compatibility can lead to degraded service quality, leading to dropped calls, slow speeds, and poor call quality.
The above facts underscore the vulnerabilities of traditional roaming models as well as regulatory changes placing a financial strain on operators.
What’s the solution? Well, the next section gives you the answer.
How Can MNOs and Landline Operators Capitalize on International Roaming?
Certainly, operators need a transformative approach to tackle the above challenges and meet the ever-evolving demands of customers. By adopting virtual roaming solutions, operators can capitalize on the growing demand for international roaming services.
Here’s how virtual roaming solutions can help operators eliminate their revenue leakage and overcome all the problems associated with traditional roaming.
- Expand Global Coverage Without Infrastructure Investments
Infrastructure investment for international roaming is a factor that exhausts a major chunk of the resources of operators. By leveraging virtual roaming solutions, operators can eliminate this problem. These solutions enable them to extend their services all around the globe without needing them to build and invest in roaming infrastructure, thus significantly reducing their operational costs.
- Optimize Roaming Costs
Another significant way to save money offered by virtual roaming solutions is bypassing expensive bilateral agreements with foreign networks. These software-based virtual roaming solutions simply optimize routing and connectivity, leading to higher profits and cost-effective operations for operators.
- Offer Enterprise-Focused Roaming Plans
There’s another lucrative section of the market that operators can tap into: enterprise-focused international roaming plans. Leveraging virtual roaming solutions, operators can offer tailored roaming plans for businesses that need uninterrupted global connectivity for their operations.
- Enhance Customer Experience
We have already learned that traditional roaming solutions made operators suffer lower customer satisfaction rates, particularly because of coverage gaps, poor call quality, and high charges. Through virtual roaming services, operators can effectively address these issues. Besides ensuring seamless, high-quality connectivity to subscribers, they can provide them the benefit of using their existing phone numbers. While this improves customer satisfaction, operators also witness reduced churn rates.
- Simplify Roaming Management
Virtual roaming solutions present operators with a streamlined and simplified way to manage their roaming services. Through centralized dashboards, operators can gain real-time insights into usage patterns and network performance. They can easily adjust their offerings based on the demand and availability of the network.
Virtual Roaming Solutions: Revolutionizing International Roaming for Business
Suppose there’s a US-based multinational company with overseas offices in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and clients spread across 50+ countries. For client meetings, team collaboration, and project management, the MNC employees frequently travel internationally.
Some of the major challenges the company faces with its current roaming services are high roaming bills for voice calls, SMS, and data usage. Inconsistent call quality and managing roaming plans are some additional problems for the business.
As a telecom operator, you can target such a set of enterprise clients by providing them with virtual roaming services. REVE virtual roaming solution is an innovative app designed specifically for mobile operators, enabling them to:
- Expand their services
- Retain their lost roaming revenue
- Deliver a superior roaming experience
Conclusion
Our discussion underscores the fact that for businesses operating at a global scale, seamless international connectivity is a necessity. As Albert Einstein once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” For businesses and telecom operators alike, adapting to the evolving needs of international connectivity is essential.
The global data roaming market was valued at $34.43 billion in 2022, and is expected to grow to $75.5 billion by 2032. This highlights the need for innovative and future-proof roaming solutions to meet the demands of global businesses while addressing their concerns with traditional roaming services. Virtual roaming solutions, like REVE, are certainly transforming the landscape of international business connectivity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between virtual roaming and traditional roaming?
Traditional roaming relies on physical network agreements between carriers, leading to higher costs. Virtual roaming uses cloud technology and local partnerships, providing a cost-effective, scalable alternative.
Do virtual roaming solutions work for both MNOs and MVNOs?
Yes, virtual roaming solutions, such as REVE, are designed for MNOs and MVNOs to help them expand their services.
Can roaming services deliver high call quality across regions?
Traditional roaming services may face call quality issues due to network congestion, latency, etc.; however, modern virtual roaming solutions leverage optimized routing and advanced technology to deliver high call quality.
What are the challenges of traditional international roaming faced by telecom operators?
High infrastructure investment, high customer churn rate, decline in roaming revenues, etc., are some common challenges faced by telecom operators.
What are the USPs of REVE virtual roaming solution?
REVE virtual roaming solution offers a multitude of benefits for operators and subscribers alike. While subscribers can enjoy reduced roaming bills, home country number continuity, and value-added services, operators get the advantage of reclaiming their lost revenue, lower subscriber churn, superior roaming experience, and a ready-to-launch product.
How can telecom operators add international roaming to their service portfolio?
Telcos can leverage virtual roaming solutions, like REVE virtual Roaming Solution, to offer reliable and affordable roaming services.
Is virtual roaming secure for business communications?
Yes, virtual roaming solutions employ advanced encryption and authentication protocols to ensure secure communication between users and networks, safeguarding sensitive business data.
