MessageSENTRY Steering Of Roaming

Optimize Steering Results

Mobile operators are continuously striving to improve top-line and bottom-line revenue in today’s highly competitive market place. Roaming revenues are some of the most profitable sources of income for an operator. Therefore, taking a closer look at how to improve that side of the business is absolutely critical. One method of achieving this goal is to implement a Steering of Roaming (SoR) solution as many operators have already done and now are reaping the benefits.

Maximize Revenues within Roaming Groups

Group operators want to achieve a fine balance of maximizing revenues within the group versus achieving a positive subscriber experience. Mobile operators would like to ensure subscribers will access a network which provides all of their familiar advanced services. Therefore they need a rules-based SoR solution to dynamically steer their outbound roaming subscribers to preferred visited networks. This enables the operator to send traffic to different partners based on criteria such as:

• Negotiated SLA’s for traffic volumes in a bilateral agreement
• Operator group membership
• Network coverage
• Availability of subscriber services – i.e. 3G voice and data, Post/Prepaid, MMS.

Doing so will help increase subscriber usage and ensure that on average the lowest possible wholesale roaming rates are achieved thus increasing revenue and improving margins.

The MessageSENTRY SoR system is a standards-based solution (GSMA IR.73) that provides mobile operators a highly granular policy-based real-time control system for automating dynamic rules for which network a subscriber will connect to at any given time. The MessageSENTRY SoR application leverages our unique transparent SS7 network border filtering feature. This dramatically reduces the signaling load on core network assets like International GW, MSC’s, STP’s and HLR’s. This reduces the excessive burden on these high value resources which ultimately provides a much lower cost and more reliable solution over competing products.

Key Benefits

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership - transparent signaling interception dramatically reduces the core network signaling load over that of competing solutions – i.e. avoid the need for performance upgrades to overburdened HLR’s, STP’s and GW-MSC’s as required by competing solutions.
• Improves negotiation of favorable roaming agreements by ensuring SLA commitments
• Keep roaming revenue within an operator group
• Negotiate the best tariffs, load balance traffic to maximize profitability
• Ensure subscribers have access to advanced services by steering them to preferred networks
• Increased subscriber usage and satisfaction by ensuring QoS and availability of familiar services
• Intuitive and flexible steering rules creation for network engineers or Marketing team
• Highly granular real time control system for establishing steering rules

Key Features

• Transparent Signaling Interception
  The SoR system leverages our transparent signaling interception capability which is the only solution on the market that dramatically reduces the signaling load on expensive core network elements like HLR’s, STP’s and GW-MSC’s.
• Plug & Play Connectivity – easy install
  With our transparent platform, the SoR system is literally plug and play, no network re-engineering required. Not a single network element needs to be reconfigured.
• Network or Country Steering Rules
  Operators can steer based on network operator or country.
• Load Distribution Steering Rules
  Operators can load balance specific percentages of traffic to specified carriers.
• Roamer Profile Steering Rules
  Steering rules can be set based on the type of services a subscriber expects to be available when roaming, i.e. Prepaid, Postpaid, 3G.
• Date & Time Based Steering Rules
  Steering rules can be set based on the time of the day, the day of the week, specific date or date range.
• VLR Based Steering Rules
  Steering rules can be applied to specific VLR’s.
• Blacklist Rules
  Allows the operate to create exception rules for certain IMSI’s to block steering operations on those mobiles allowing them free access to any network.
• Denial of Service Detection/Prevention
  Allow registration after a preset number of rejections
• Intuitive Web-based Provisioning
  Provisioning tools are very intuitive to use. Whether you are in the network engineering team or the marketing team, it’s fairly straight-forward to implement new rules on the system.
• Visibility & Reporting
  KPI reports, detailed network reports, statistical reports in addition to a wide array of fully customizable reports.
• Standards-based Solution
  GSMA IR.73
• Scalable Distributed Platform
  Cost effective for Tier 3 carriers yet easily scalable to support Tier1 carriers.