What Does a Roaming Business Audit Include?
 Our Roaming Business Audits are designed to help answer vital questions. These are questions that have a direct impact on your roaming revenue and profit.
These questions include:
• What steering targets do roaming partners give my network? Am I getting the traffic I should be?
• Is my steering platform working properly? Am I a victim of anti-steering activity?
• Where do my subscribers go? Where do they never make calls or send SMS?
• Where do visitors come from? Which ones never make calls or send SMS?
• How many subscribers do not connect to my network because I don’t have a CAMEL agreement in place?
• Where might I be losing roamers because of signal strength issues?
• Where do I have SS7 configuration issues / interconnect issues? How many visitors cannot attach to my network because of this?
• How much traffic is flowing through our network now? Why has traffic dropped today? What has changed?
• How many SMS fraud attempts are going on? Is there any other suspicious activity?
• How do I check my MSU interconnect bill?
• What partners are blocking our SMS traffic? How many international SMS messages are being lost due to the lack of suitable agreements?
Equipped with the answers to these questions, you can take positive action to improve performance and boost revenue. You can also explain to your colleagues, the issues that are affecting the roaming business.
How Do We Answer These Questions?
First we collect information about your roaming network using two types of probe.
One of these is a passive, loss less, SS7 probe. In many cases this can be loaded as software onto an existing node on your SS7 network. In other cases we fit a temporary probe. If you decide that you want a permanent “dashboard” implemented, we replace this with a full twin server redundant system. This probe collects all of the messages seen on the SS7 network. The data is then processed and organised to make it easier to manipulate and analyse.
The other type of probe is a radio probe. It is an automated system called Sensustech ™ that uses SIMs from your network and those of your competitors. A number of these are fitted to a vehicle and driven around the key areas of your network.
The information that they generate is entered into our INSIGHT™ geographic coverage modelling tool. Another static radio probe is used to check for anti-steering activity and, in the case of a fraud health check, forms part of the test mechanism to detect SIM boxes or gateway by-pass systems.
This data is then analysed in a variety of ways. From the SS7 data we produce a number of tabled reports. Then, if we see anything unusual, we did deeper.
 The radio data is fed into our modelling tool. This is used to predict areas where your radio coverage relative to competitors may lead to the loss of roamers. We predict the likely situation for indoor based roamers and produce a simple map that shows areas at risk.
If you would like to know more detail about our roaming business audits, please get in touch. We will be delighted to send you a sample report. Try clicking the "Can I help?" button at the top of the column to the right.
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