Verizon on the hunt for LTE roaming partners

US operator Verizon is seeking operators around the world to act as LTE roaming partners, the firm told Telecoms.com. At Mobile World Congress 2013, Greg Dial, director for global roaming at Verizon Wireless, explained that his brief for the show was to identify potential roaming partners in popular overseas markets.

“We have a plan,” said Dial. “And we are surveying the market and looking at our travel centres to see where US customers are going. It’s a wide variety of destinations but certainly the UK is a market we look at very closely; the Caribbean and Latin America too and in North America; Canada and Mexico.”

He explained that the operator is monitoring those regions in order to anticipate which spectrum bands will prevail for LTE services. Itthen plans to look at bands in devices that match up with where 4G LTE is going to be available internationally.

“We’re still in the planning stages, but we’re here at MWC building relationships for 4G LTE roaming, both outbound but we’re also open for business for inbound roaming as well.

“So for customers of the international community, regardless of what operator they’re with – if the bands match up with either 700C or in the future AWS, or deeper in the future, with future bands, we are very excited to have customers come in and use what is, at least right now, the largest 4G LTE network in the US and I believe in the world.”

According to reports, the US operator is mulling over the option to merge with UK-headquartered Vodafone, which has local operations in 21 countries worldwide, including the UK, Australia, Germany and India. Vodafone already holds a 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless. Verizon Communications owns the rest.

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