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A glimpse behind the roaming solutions curtain

Jeremy Green

A glimpse behind the roaming solutions curtain

The GSMA's acceptance of a new tool to optimize signaling traffic for roaming services offers a momentary glimpse of the hidden struggles within the roaming services market. Beneath an apparently placid exterior there is much turbulence as operators deploy measures and counter-measures in an effort to direct the lucrative traffic of inbound roamers.

The introduction of traffic steering was only the first shot in the battle for control of roaming traffic

Roaming solutions provider Starhome can take comfort from the decision of a GSMA Working Group, the Billing and Accounting Roaming Group (BARG), to write formal acceptance of one of its products into a new GSMA Permanent Reference Document - IR89, for GSM anoraks.

The background to this decision reveals much about developments in the roaming services market, which has become increasingly complex and shadowy since the initial development of tools that allowed operators to control the behavior of their outbound roamers.

First, there was traffic steering. Around 2005, operators began to deploy solutions that enabled them to determine the network that its outbound roamers selected in a visited country. This gave a new dimension to IOT negotiations, and allowed the bigger operators to play potential roaming partners off against each other. Later it led to the formation of a plethora of roaming alliances and created additional synergies for the big operator groups.

Anti-steering: the visited network strikes back

Then there was anti-steering. As some operators saw the supply of lucrative inbound roamers start to dwindle, vendors stepped in to offer anti-SOR (steering of roaming) solutions. These stopped the home network from controlling its outbound roamers by spoofing the signaling messages that would be generated by user-driven manual network selection (enshrined as untouchable in the GSMA's guidelines defining what kinds of steering were allowed).

BARG took a dim view of this, reasoning that control ought to reside with the subscriber's home network. It defined anti-steering as “any technical network-based methods that can effectively frustrate, counteract, or undo the effect of SOR when applied without the consent or participation of either the roaming subscriber or the HPMN operator.” Anti-steering measures remained outside the technical standards developed by 3GPP and the commercial roaming framework maintained by the GSMA. This is as close to banning it as the GSMA can get, given that national telecoms regulations are unlikely to take a position on the intricacies of signaling traffic between networks in different countries.

The next step in the increasing arms race between home and visited networks was the development of countermeasures against anti-steering - to be precise, solutions that enabled operators to detect when anti-SOR systems were in place in those networks that their subscribers were visiting by analyzing signaling traffic patterns for anomalies.

Gateway Location Registers are really, really not anti-steering devices

Clearly, there are heightened sensitivities surrounding anything that interacts with roaming signaling traffic. This may go some way to explaining why roaming software provider Starhome has gone to such lengths to demonstrate that its latest solution, the Gateway Location Register (GLR), is endorsed by the GSMA. It's important that the product is not identified as supporting anti-steering measures.

The GLR is intended to reduce signaling traffic from the visited network to the home network. As roamers move about within the visited network, they transfer between one visitor location register (VLR) and another. Each such transfer generates a signaling message back to the home network, even though the subscriber is still on the same network. The GLR effectively takes over the function of the home network, giving permission for the visitor to remain on the visited network without the need to signal the home network.

It's not hard to see how this could be confused with anti-steering, even though the GLR requires the permission of the home network to perform its task. Entities that pretend to be another network, which tends to be the essential function of devices called gateways, inevitably provoke some suspicion. So the seal of approval from the GSMA is important. For the avoidance of doubt, though, the Association has not endorsed the GLR; it's just confirmed that it isn't anti-steering.

Five years ago, when the ideas for the GLR were first developed, nobody cared too much about signaling traffic. Roaming was lucrative and signaling was cheap or free. Now with regulatory pressure on roaming revenues and signaling increasingly treated as a valuable resource, it may be an idea whose time has come.

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