The 5G Roaming Lab has its first meeting on July 13th
IO is built on the need to help Roaming develop and on 13th July 2021 we will have our first meeting of the newly formed 5G Roaming Lab (5GRL).
MNOs globally interested in 5G Roaming and especially 5G SA Roaming should attend these sessions to set the agenda for what IO will work on in this specific arena.
Some background: The VoLTE Roaming Problem
The Industry has really slipped with VoLTE roaming, the price for which many operators will continue to pay for a while. Only 16 MNOs have launched VoLTE Roaming (source GSMA – Dec 2020) and 2022 is shaping up to be the year when major decommissioning activity will take place, (Source ROCCO Research). Many MNOs are likely to lose voice services with important roaming partner networks.
For the first time in our history, Mobile operators will see their roaming footprints shrink or have to deal with monopolistic roaming partners in otherwise competitive markets. There’s no running away from the fact, that as an industry we were abysmally slow to pick up on the link between decommissioning and VoLTE Roaming, and in the coming years many operators will have to answer very difficult questions to their customers as to why they are unable to serve them with roaming across the world as they used to previously. Withdrawal of services is akin to handing over customers to far inferior competing technologies and OTT applications.
Let’s think about 5G Roaming
The position on VoLTE Roaming is surely what 5G Roaming is going to look like soon. However, there is so much more at stake. When we talk about 5G Roaming, since most of our backend processes were designed for 2G, how are we meant to succeed here?
The 5GRL Agenda
- Rollout challenges
- Slicing strategies
- SLAs
- QoS strategies
- Plus many more challenges MNOs are talking about
If you’re an MNO facing any of these challenges and would like to open the discussions, ask questions about the session, submit inputs for this meeting, please contact info@innovativeoperators.io by 6th July 2021.
