Mobile Operator - Wholesale Department

Mobile operators have three department areas within their organization.  Retail, Wholesale and Operation.  Each business area requires its own unique roaming solutions to assist the department in optimizing and meeting their business goals and targets. 

The role of the wholesale department is to set out the commercial terms of the bi-lateral agreements between operators abroad and home operators. These agreements are known as IOT (Inter-Operator Tariff) agreements. Solutions most suited for wholesale departments are solutions that retain roamers on the operator’s preferred network, enabling them to reach their targets.

Starhome offers the wholesale department tailor-made solutions that best fit these roaming needs.  The Starhome® Next Generation Intelligent Preferred Network™ solution is a Steering of Roaming" (SoR) solution that can be used in combination with SS7 and OTA based steering to maximize steering efficiency and retain roamers on a preferred network. Other solutions include the Starhome® Gateway Location Register™ solution which provides an optimization tool to increase inbound roaming revenues and reduce international signaling costs.

Accidental roaming is commonplace and occurs when a roamer is travelling near an international border. When roamers stay or travel near country borders, there may be areas where neighboring country networks have good coverage, causing the handsets to automatically select a foreign network and, unaware of this registration, may stay with the foreign network, resulting in high international rates/tariffs for both incoming and outgoing calls and SMSs, as well as loss of revenue to the Wholesale department of the home network operator. The Starhome® Intelligent Border Roaming® solution combines control over all registration attempts of roaming subscribers and successfully prevents handsets from selecting foreign networks.

Anti-Sor" detectors allow operators to detect anti-Steering of Roaming (anti-SoR) practices that may be used by roaming partners.  The Starhome® Anti-SoR™ solution allows home network operators to detect anti-SoR activities used by visited network operators on their outbound roamers. The solution produces a steering analysis report after it has identified exceptional behavior or unusual changes in traffic statistics