What is Roaming Business

Understanding Roaming

This Section is aimed at understanding the Roaming business. Ever since the launch of GSM services, Roaming has been one of the major revenue-generating options. As the local tariffs are coming down day after day, Telcos are looking at different Services that could generate revenue. Roaming is one such service with a very robust business guideline of GSM Association (Organization involved in standardizing the GSM technology).

What is Roaming

 In simple words, Roaming is a solution that keeps you connected while you’re away from your home network. For customers, no extra effort needs to be taken apart from getting Roaming Services enabled, if necessary. 

For the operator, it is a different story altogether.  Before offering Roaming service to customers, the operator has to have a Roaming Tie-up. There are approximately 600 GSM Mobile Operators across the world and it takes considerable data mining in prioritizing the Region, Country, and the Operator to be approached for Roaming tie-up.

Depending upon factors like Network Capabilities, Billing system dependencies, Business decision, Roaming agreement could either be Unilateral or Bilateral.

Unilateral Roaming agreement can again be classified as 

   Unilateral Inroaming 

   Unilateral Outroaming 

  To understand the unilateral tie-up, let us understand the following analogy

  Consider you belong to network A and network A has got Roaming tie-up with network B.

In Unilateral Outroaming, you would be able to avail the Mobile services of Network B but the customers of Network B will not be able to use Mobile services of network A. In the case of Unilateral Inroaming, it would be another way around.

Bilateral Roaming agreement will allow customers of both the networks to avail Mobile Services while Roaming.