The Long Tale of Roaming Data

If you lose your cell phone while traveling abroad, you could ring up a large phone bill. Luckily for a British couple traveling in South Africa, whose phone was stolen, T-Mobile agreed to write off their $16,000 bill (as the circumstances were exceptional). A British soldier serving in Iraq was not so lucky when he rang up a $3,000 bill talking to his fiancee in Liverpool.

In order to reduce the likelihood of excessive charges being made from any handset, the GSM Association has being working with service providers and vendors over the last 12+ months to introduce a scheme for carriers to send roaming records from the visited network operator (VPMN) to the home network operator (HPMN), within 4 hours. The idea is that these Near Real Time Roaming Data Exchange records will be generated in addition to the traditional Transferred Account Procedure (TAP) records and High Usage Records (HUR).

All of these records are normally transferred via a Clearinghouse, but the billing records (TAP) are normally reconciled only once per month, and the HUR records within 36 hours, so it was felt necessary to generate a new format and to transfer it within 4 hours. In practice the NRTRDE records may be processed within 10-30 minutes. In this way out of control usage can be identified quickly and controlled.

The NRTRDE solution is due to become effective from 1st October 2008, but strangely the focus in only on voice calls and does not address roaming data charges.

Piotr Staniaszek, a Canadian oil-field worked from Calgary, was used to paying $150/month for his phone and was used to being notified of any high charges. He signed up for a $10 unlimited mobile browser plan from Bell Mobility, hooked his mobile phone up to his computer and proceeded to download high-definition movies and other large files. When he received his first bill for $65,000 in November 2007 he thought it was a mistake, but then the December bill arrived for $85,000. Bell Mobility has since lowered the bill to $3,243, but Mr Staniaszek says he intends to fight the charges anyway as he was not aware that connecting his mobile phone to his laptop and using it as a modem was outside his plan.

Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, recently blogged about having his iPhone account suspended when he hit $2,000 worth of international roaming charges, as unbeknownst to him his iPhone was polling for e-mail every 15 minutes as he traveled from Europe to Israel and on to China. As he wrote "How can AT&T be smart enough to offer a revolutionary device like the iPhone, which is all about delightful user experience, and yet let their own customer communications be a chilling reminder how little phone companies care about their users?"

The problem is often in the mediation and analytics solutions that operators are using. The sheer volume of data and the ability to process it quickly results in sloppy, backward, customer service. These are the problems that EventDynamics and 10e Business Analytics address, today. If you are looking to go beyond the NRTDRE requirements for 2008 and address the data challenges of tomorrow, give us a call.