Roaming assurance product launch from Tektronix
Network intelligence company Tektronix has launched a roaming assurance tool designed to enable operators to make sure they aren’t losing roaming revenues because of network or service performance issues.
Keith Cobler, Marketing Manager at Tektronix, said that the company has applied its network intelligence tools – probes, correlation software and analysis – to the mobile roaming area to create its Roaming and Interconnect Assurance (RIA) system.
The business case Cobler makes for the RIA is that with roaming revenues under threat from legislation, and the complexity of services and level of service use increasing, operators need tools that enable them to monitor and manage service levels for elements in both the home and visited network.
Tektronix’s system is designed to sit on the interfaces between the IP, SS7 and GRX (GPRS Exchange) carriers and home network elements such as the GMSC, GGSN and HLR. Cobler said that that allowed monitoring of both the home and the visited network – as performance could be affected by events on either network, or with the interconnect carrier.
Tektronix has developed “dozens” of use cases, according to Cobler. One that Mobile Europe saw was to use network information to ensure that roaming was being optimally routed. Tektronix’s system allows information to be presented in terms of billable minutes, availability as well as accessibility. In this way carriers can work out which roaming partner would be the highest generator of revenues – and strategically re-route roaming traffic.
Another use case is to analyse the reasons for poor service performance when data performance could be affected by performance in multiple domains. The Roaming and Interconnect Assurance product can be used to assess KIPs for SLAs across these domains. Cobler said the service can also prevent revenue leakage by identifying specific roaming and interconnect issues.
Tektronix’s tool, which is GRQ compliant, is one of a number of approaches to roaming assurance. You can register for a free webinar on these issues here, hosted by Keith Dyer, editor of Mobile Europe.