Vodafone may have claimed last year that it would help squeeze independent IPX providers out of the market, but it still needs its friends to support important roaming services, such as VoLTE, through its IPX hub. Its latest deal is with iBasis, the IPX division of The Netherlands’ KPN.
The two companies have signed a peering agreement, which is already carrying live LTE roaming traffic. That extends Vodafone’s 4G roaming markets to iBasis’s customers, while the Dutch player gets direct access to Vodafone subsidiaries themselves, and to customer of the UK giant’s Carrier Services IPX hub.
iBasis CEO Willem Offerhaus said: “We are pleased to extend out relationship via our multi-service IPX interconnect, helping to ensure a consistent global LTE experience for iBasis and Vodafone customers around the world.”
iBasis has a 4G roaming footprint of over 130 networks accessible via its multiservice IPX interconnect. It has direct connections with several units of Latin American giant Claro plus Polkomtel of Poland and of course KPN, and many peering deals like the one with Vodafone.
Meanwhile, Vodafone Carrier Services was established in 2013 by consolidating the carrier services of the firm’s various operating companies, to form one of the largest wholesale telecoms providers in the world. One of its most important offerings is global IPX/LTE to expand the 4G and VoLTE roaming services it can offer its own group members, its partners and its wholesale customers.
The timing is good, as first wave LTE roll-outs gain sufficient scale that customers are starting to expect global roaming. But there are particular complexities with 4G roaming, especially when it comes to voice, and third party hubs are likely to play an important role. “Mobile subscribers today are beginning to reject the notion of network boundaries,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, CEO of Vodafone Carrier Services.
Most operators acknowledge that IPX players will flourish as the industry battles to establish roaming deals in a 4G market that is experiencing accelerated roll-out and customer demand. Frameworks are needed urgently and, as in the original days of 2G roaming, the GSMA has a big part to play in bringing carriers together. At the recent LTE Voice Summit, David Hutton, technical director of the carrier association’s Network 2020 Programme, told the audience that IPX service providers would be critical to VoLTE roaming in particular.
“An operator would find it very difficult to have relationships with each one of their partners, or each of the other 799 operators around the world. To set up all those routing and signalling establishments, particularly the routes that you use internationally, is very complex,” he said.
Maria Cuevas, head of core mobile networks R&D at the UK’s BT, concurred, saying: “From a network-to-network perspective we think that IPX providers have a huge role to play and can actually help overcome problems of interoperability between IMS providers, be it at the signalling level, be it transcoding in the network, be it quality of service end-to-end, and things like multimedia routing and how to route the media through the optimal path through the network. Those are value added features that an IPX provider can help operators with.”
IPX is seen as the ‘glue’ which will ease the tortured process of handling IMS interoperability and the Diameter signalling underpinning VoLTE exchanges. IPX is the next generation, all-IP successor to GRX (GPRS Roaming Exchange, the key roaming framework for 2G and 3G data). IPX was designed to support consistent user experience even on partner systems, and so can support the rising use of service level agreements in mobile, and the introduction of tariffs tiered by QoS levels. It does this by guaranteeing enough bandwidth to keep services running at optimum speeds. It is increasingly being adopted as a standard for interconnecting fixed and mobile carriers, MVNOs and over-the-top providers, enabling international giants like BT to work with large numbers of partners and deliver common services across vast networks.
IPX in the mobile world lives within a GSMA-defined communications ecosystem which supports multiple services – voice, data and signalling – over a single IP connection and provides many other benefits, including enhanced voice quality, cascaded billing and payments and – because an IPX is physically and logically separate from the public internet – security. Within this, IPX enables the use of Diameter signalling for the exchange of policy, authentication and mobility information between networks as users roam, and for local break-out (LBO), a more efficient approach to handling roaming traffic, which reduces latency and boosts data rates by offloading traffic to the roaming network, rather than routing it back to the home system.
However, there is the threat of overcrowding in the market. When Vodafone launched its Carrier Services unit last year, built around its Cable & Wireless Worldwide acquisition, the outfit’s head, Brian Fitzpatrick, said in an interview that there would be no space left for third parties. Vodafone would have the world‘s largest physical MPLS infrastructure by the end of 2014, he said, to support a wide range of solutions for operators, including IPX.
“What we‘re doing, pointing the industry towards an IPX access, is quite threatening to third party aggregators, because for the first time their business model is in question,” he said in the interview. “The industry doesn‘t need third party IPX but it does need to connect to Vodafone because we have 20% of the world‘s handsets. And while everyone wants to come to us we‘re just giving them a better door to come through.”
Many carriers do have their own IPX offerings, and there has already been some consolidation among the independents, as seen by the acquisition of Aicent by Syniverse. But Syniverse, whose merger with another carrier services provider, Mach, was finalized in early 2013, is clearly building itself up to be a viable independent alternative to the carriers’ own offerings, alongside rivals like Comfone, Sybase 365, BICs and TNS. It is shaping up to be a formidable player in LTE and IP roaming hubs and other intercarrier services, expanding from its roots in SMS and MMS interworking, into LTE and IMS roaming and interoperability. When it merged with Mach, it claimed to support 900 operators worldwide, while Mach had 650 customers, including enterprises and wireline providers as well as the core base of cellcos.
Its challenge will rest on the core rationale for the independents – the ability to connect all the operators which do not have the resources to build their own IPX infrastructure, and to provide value added services to smaller cellcos.
But there are new approaches emerging, including the inevitable ‘as a service‘ offerings. For instance, wholesale carrier services firm BICS partnered with Syniverse itself earlier this year, to interconnect their IPX communities and support hosted, IP-based interworking and roaming services.