At ROCCO HQ we’re here to ask the big questions for the Roaming Managers, Coordinators and staff of the International Roaming team of an MNO, not only because they might not have time to, but because we want like they do to see some innovation in this space.

Has the need for Data Clearing already peaked?

In our 3rd Annual ROCCO DCH Vendor Performance research we asked MNOs if they think it will be necessary to continue to use DCH in the future. The results were interesting to us, since for the last 5 years we have been hearing whether with LTE, VoLTE, M2M, IoT etc the need for exchanging billing records will prevail between MNOs for Roaming in the long term.

Can an MNO, really continue to perform International Roaming without using a Data Clearing House? We also hear that the response is yes… (more data available in our report).

In addition to this discussion comes the view that whether International Roaming in the traditional sense we have known over the past 20 years will also continue.

We already know from our Research last year that 70-80% of Roamers are Silent Roamers and with GSMA moves to deliver eSIM the chances are that migration towards Inbound Roamers using domestic services will increase and then its just a question of how to provision services.

Mechanisms for delivering billing are for sure also changing, fewer are the days when the Roaming Subscriber doesn’t know what they have been billed (even if they are still not clear what to charges to expect).

Data Clearing Houses need to come up with more innovation to keep Data Clearing an important aspect of the MNOs outlook for International Roaming. Consistently in the 3 years we have been running our research our KPI “Reporting Integration” remains a highly important requirement for MNOs and yet scores low across the board in the KPIs. If DCH were to master this area they could find themselves as much more than a function in the delivery of billing but reporting in a consistent way across all an MNOs Roaming footprint on the “heartbeat”of Roaming.

Nevertheless MNOs agree that DCH Vendors are an important part of delivering International Roaming today and can see considerable benefits in using them at least for the next 5 years.

Our Data Clearing Vendor Performance Report 2016 contains details into the use of Data Clearing as well as a review of all the best Vendors in the market and is available to buy from our website.