Claro Peru opens up to LTE roaming

KPN’s carrier services operation, iBasis, this week scored an LTE signalling exchange and roaming contract from Claro Peru, a subsidiary of America Movil.

Using the iBasis Hosted Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) and LTE Signaling eXchange (LSX), Claro will be able to provide international LTE roaming for mobile users in Peru as well as giving Claro access to the iBasis global LTE footprint, which includes more than 100 LTE networks worldwide.

Claro Peru is the third America Movil operator in the region to implement the iBasis LTE roaming solution. Claro Brazil and Telcel Mexico announced their participation in May and June, respectively.

According to the findings of the Telecoms.com Intelligence Industry Survey 2014 LTE roaming section, sponsored by iBasis, only around a fifth of respondents strongly believe that mobile operators are justified in charging LTE roaming at a premium to other roaming services.

Price is expected to remain an important competitive differentiator in LTE roaming, although not the most important. We asked respondents to rate a number of competitive differentiators for roaming services on the same one to seven scale (where seven was extremely effective). Of the six options provided, price differentiation was ranked fourth by respondents in total and third by operator respondents.

It was nonetheless rated highly, with 41.4 per cent of respondents (and 44.4 per cent of operator respondents) scoring it six or seven. Judged most effective, and given a six or seven rating by half of respondents, was service continuity. Judged least effective, with a high rating from 25.6 per cent of respondents, was geographical differentiation.

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Operators may have to look to more advanced services if they want to command a premium, rather than simply charging more for LTE as a basic connection. Asked which kind of roaming services might justify a premium in future (outside of the EU, where regulatory pressure is intense) operator respondents backed guaranteed QoS for LTE data strongly. This option drew the highest level of support, selected by 61 per cent of respondents, followed by application-specific data (selected by 44.3 per cent) and tiered throughput for LTE data (selected by 37.3 per cent).

There was acceptance that legacy services like SMS and MMS will struggle to continue to command roaming premiums, with just 11.8 per cent and 8.5 per cent of operator respondents selecting these options respectively. Indeed there was widespread agreement that legacy voice and SMS roaming traffic will decline as users become increasingly reliant on IP communications apps while roaming, which offers a potential threat to operator revenues. 47 per cent of respondents and 49.4 per cent of operator respondents ranked their agreement with this statement six or seven.