RAEX50 Reasons why Operators Roaming Teams should make RAEX compliance their number 1 project

Some good things in nature always take time and effort to produce. RAEX as a project started in the GSMA with the creation of the RIG in 2001. RIG was a small satellite (and unofficial) sub-group of BARG which was mandated with solving the issues of data exchange between Operators. BARG had identified that the processes and data exchanged by Operators was not only fundamental to the success of Roaming but also revenue effecting and inefficient.

My personal journey with RAEX began soon after the RIG Group was created. I was Deputy Chair of RIG which became RING, an official Sub-Group of the GSMA with some really great innovative ideas for Roaming. I became chair of RING in 2007 and any BARG delegates around this time will recall my speeches, as well as those of others at the BARG meeting about compliance and the need for support towards RAEX.

So to 2015, and when asked recently at the first GSMA WAS meeting whether I thought RAEX was worthwhile I had to dig back into my past memories of all the hard work we did in RING and whether I thought RAEX still had the same mandate that it had 14 years ago.

When we look today at what has happened in recent years with RAEX we can see some concrete steps have emerged. There were moments when every Operator had their doubts about whether or not it could make sense. That’s why its very pleasing to see that now almost 250 Operators are compliant and using the various types of RAEX there are available.

  • RAEX IR.21
  • RAEX IOT
  • RAEX OpData
  • Electronic Invoice Data Exchange (EID)

And on balance, so many things have changed about the project in recent years it is important to understand and reflect upon what went well. In the past, no-one ever successfully brought in skilled process people, innovative database consultants who could take any process or data and express how it could be exchanged well.

The German now Luxembourgish company Roamsys supported the GSMA in building the new system and it’s a very exciting and innovative tool and it is a credit to the Operators and Vendors involved in the GSMA work who perservered in the project and made it what they wanted it to be. Some of whom have seen the entire journey.

When creating an Industry standard it’s not easy to take global opinion and boil it down to a few simple rules and conditions. Every attempt to finalise the solution was met with new thoughts and ideas from various sides who began to see the possibilities of the solution. While the tool today is not 100% future proof, it’s in good hands and Operators are already starting to see the long awaited benefits of RAEX Compliance.

Don’t forget that with almost 250 Operators compliant it is feasible that some Operators have all of their Roaming Partners RAEX compliant today and are already asking for the next steps in their data revolution.

So I promised 50 Reasons why Operators should be RAEX Compliant and here they are. Others will have other reasons to mine. Please share this article with the your line manager or any authority who may have doubts to why RAEX compliance should be the number 1 project for Roaming teams. It’s 2015 and time for change, time for data management to move to the next level and beyond it.

 

50 reasons for RAEX

  1. It can save money in employing a resource to manually enter RAEX data into a database, in Commercial as well as Technology teams
  2. It will make your company compliant to RAEX which in turn effects your GSMA Operator Rating
  3. It will speed up your delivery of Roaming Agreements, AA.12, AA.13, AA.73 etc
  4. It will help with IREG Testing
  5. It will help with TADIG Testing
  6. It will help with Roaming Billing efficiently and cleanly
  7. It will help the Roaming Finance Team
  8. It will help with the effective launch of Roaming Partners as a network
  9. It will assist the Data Clearing House to be more efficient
  10. It will assist the Financial Clearing house to be more efficient
  11. It will assist with your efficiency in settlement and bad debt management
  12. It will help the NRTRDE Agent
  13. And help with your NRTRDE Compliance
  14. It will help the Roaming Marketing Team
  15. It will help the Roaming Retail Team
  16. It will help the Network, NMC team
  17. It will help with Fraud Prevention in general and identifying issues earlier
  18. It will help with faults, reporting and resolution
  19. It will help to identify compatible partners for CAMEL
  20. Also for 3G
  21. Also for LTE and LTE+ and by 2020 5G
  22. And Voice
  23. And Roaming SMS
  24. And SMS Interworking,
  25. MMSI (incase you still use this?)
  26. It will also help the SMSI Hub to be more efficient
  27. It will help the Roaming Hub to be more efficient
  28. It will help with management of M2M Roaming
  29. It will help with management of Wi-Fi Roaming
  30. It will help with management of Roaming Regulation
  31. It will ultimately increase your Roaming Partner footprint (some operators only work with RAEX Compliant Operators)
  32. It will allow you to research and study IOT strategy
  33. It will help you complete Discounts more easily
  34. It will be effective in the designation of Preferred Partners
  35. It will help you to plan your overall Roaming Strategy
  36. It will strengthen your individual, team and company professional networks
  37. It will allow you to manage simply all contacts
  38. It will make you more responsive to revenue effecting data needed to capture Inbound Roamers
  39. It will allow you to manage a multiple IOT environment (which for European operators is highly important)
  40. It will allow you to identify Roaming Partners by key identifiers such as TADIG Code and MCCMNC
  41. It will help your customer care to solve issues quicker
  42. It will help you identify small and large Groups and Alliances and their strategies
  43. It will help you understand the difference between brand and company names
  44. It will help with core network configurations and eradicate misconfigurations
  45. It can help that you may use the same Industry Databases that everyone is using to search for information
  46. It will help with Roaming fault tickets and searching for ASNs, IP Addresses, CCs/NDCs, DPCs, IMSIs in order to do work easily
  47. It will allow you to add additional Roaming Partners to important reports needed internally
  48. It will help you SS7 Provider, GRX and IPX Carriers become more efficient
  49. It will help you communicate changes to your network, teams, processes and strategies to your Roaming Partners
  50. It will motivate your team, because it will change their access to data forever in a positive way

Has anyone ever explained it to you like this before?

For more information on RAEX chat with us, if we can’t help you we know all the right people in the industry to assist.

 

Jason Bryan is CEO of ROCCO: The Roaming Consulting Company Ltd based in the UK