By Nana Appiah Acquaye, Accra, Ghana
BICS, a global wholesale carrier for voice, mobile data and capacity services, says it has witness a rapid increase in LTE roaming traffic over its market-leading IPX network. According to a press release available to Biztechafrica, last year, kicked off by the European holiday season of 2014, the company experienced a 25% month-on-month growth in traffic which continued throughout 2014 and into the first quarter of 2015.
It stated that BICS’ LTE roaming services are supported by its IPX transit capabilities, which also enjoyed a huge increase in adoption rates and traffic levels over the last yea r stressing that during 2014, capacity usage on the BICS GRX network grew 45% while in the same period IPX transport – comprising of next generation data traffic – grew by 400%.
Focused on enabling operators to leverage the latest available technologies, BICS has been at the centre of the evolution of IPX and introduction of LTE roaming services. During the last year, BICS enabled launches across EMEA, APAC, LATAM and North America, in countries such as France, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Poland, UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Access to domestic LTE now covers 90% of consumers in developed markets, according to the GSMA’s Mobile Economy 2015 report. With such widespread domestic availability, subscribers now expect the same data speeds when they are travelling. In order to meet these new demands, operators need to replace their existing SS7 signalling network with a new IP signalling infrastructure built on an IPX network, a change that requires a whole set of commercial agreements and technical interconnections.
BICS’ market leading IPX platform, including LTE signalling, allows service providers to exchange any IP traffic bilaterally with any IPX destination. Through one single interconnection with end-to-end quality management BICS’ IPX platform is able to minimize operators’ efforts, costs and deployment time.
“LTE roaming continues to go from strength to strength and now boasts an extensive footprint covering over 100 countries and over 235 operators supported by the full value IPX can offer,” said Mikael Schachne, VP Mobile Data Business, BICS.
“During the European holiday season last year, LTE roaming usage growth peaked at over 25% growth every month, and this has continued, unabated, into 2015. This demonstrates consumers’ strong demand for the high speed data roaming services that needs to be met by operators in order to remain competitive in their domestic markets,” added Schachne.
