Monetizing mobile data roaming—especially overseas—is something that the likes of AT&T and Verizon (News - Alert) would appear to have done a very good job of, considering the charges that one can rack up while posting those pictures of, say, the Tower of London to Facebook (News - Alert). But app usage and email aren’t the only things that users want while traveling; emerging services like VoLTE and rich communications services (RCS) are poised to offer new roaming revenue streams for savvy operators.
According to Juniper Research, there are more than 570 million mobile roamers globally. But data roaming actually represents billions in untapped revenue, because many people switch off data roaming while abroad, to avoid bill shock—in fact, 75 percent of them do.
"[Consumers] are still scared of using their phones abroad," said Adrian Baschnonga, lead analyst at EY, speaking at Total Telecom's IPX Summit 2014 in London.
However, besides the growing movement towards delivering pricing clarity and more control to consumers (often by offering usage data in real-time, and upfront alerts), RCS and VoLTE may create a situation where many users would venture back into the on-the-go data fold.
Meanwhile, RCS and VoLTE are, by their very definitions, latency-sensitive services that require a level of quality of service (QoS) to support them. RCS for instance enables the delivery of communication experiences beyond voice and SMS, using an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert)) infrastructure to deliver a range of communication modes such as chat, content sharing, VoIP, IP video call, file transfer, social networking and others. The successful implementation of RCS suite offers network operators an opportunity to increase their revenues with over-the-top (OTT)-like functionality.
In Europe, Joyn is the consumer-facing brand of the GSM Association's (GSMA (News - Alert)) RCS platform, which is being expanded most notably by Deutsche Telekom. DT recently launched Joyn in Romania and Slovakia, for instance, via its subsidiaries.
Kobus Smit, head of voice and messaging at Deutsche Telekom (News - Alert) and GSMA RCE Chair, said at the time that extending "these rich carrier-driven communication services to our national companies" is "yet another win for joyn and our customers throughout Europe."
“Joyn is usually seen as a carrier response to counter the threat to traditional revenues from OTT providers like WhatsApp,” said Dan Bieler, analyst at Forrester. But he believes that the real potential for Joyn lies in the engagement and customer loyalty opportunities.
“Joyn is hardly going to generate any direct revenues for carriers,” he said. “It’s the potential of Joyn as a platform for interactive social engagement that is more interesting.”
Except, perhaps, when it comes to roaming. Like texting or voice calls, RCS can become a mainstream form of everyday, mission-critical communication, if not even supplant other modes.
Operators that make it easy and convenient for customers to travel without worry and maintain their normal communications paths will be in a good position to boost roaming revenue.
"[Operators] don't really believe they can make it into something big," said Isabelle Paradis, president of Hot Telecom, at the Total Telecom event. "I think they are mistaken."
Baschnonga added, "There are certainly opportunities there for operators to differentiate."
The market won’t need to wait too much longer for those opportunities to present themselves. In addition to the joyn initiative, Telefonica, Vodafone, MetroPCS, SK Telecom and others have already launched RCS services.
Edited by Alisen Downey