Telefónica will, at this year’s Mobile World Congress, facilitate the first technological multi-operator 4G (LTE) Roaming experiment to offer roaming high-speed data services. Telefónica Spain will open up its 4G/LTE network to a large group of selected operators and technological partners from over 15 countries.

Delegates from those operators - that include the UAE, South Korea, Russia, the United States, Hong Kong, France, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Italy, among others - as well as the Telefónica operations that already have a commercial LTE service (United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia) in place will, for the first time, enjoy the experience of roaming high-speed data services, simultaneously and without fissures. One of the most important characteristics of this new technology is that it replicates the same 4G service quality level usually enjoyed in respective countries of origin.

Telefónica´s technical and wholesale teams in Spain have accelerated the deployment of recommendations otherwise still in the final stages of planning by the GSMA/3GPP (in whose standardisation groups Telefónica actively participates) to enable this pilot.

Telefónica as such takes the lead in marking a new technology milestone to demonstrate it is ready to include roaming high-speed LTE services in its current extensive roaming coverage, which includes over 700 operators worldwide.

Telefonica will use the LTE Diameter Exchange service offered by Telefónica Global Solutions to provide this experience. It is a service model designed in partnership with Aicent and in line with an Over IPX Services policy. It represents the largest generation of LTE traffic routing (Diameter) signalling, enabling customers to outsource LTE Roaming interoperability function while at the same time extending LTE international coverage.

In addition, in order to verify availability and quality, several Telefónica units, both local and international, have worked with Keynote SIGOS, the world leader in fraud detection and automatic end-to-end tests to measure user experience in telecommunication networks and services. Throughout the pilot, Telefónica will use the largest existing infrastructure to trial these roaming services. This system provides access to multiple networks in countries around the world, to permanently monitor roaming services and increase customer satisfaction.

Finally, and coinciding with the Congress, additional test probes have been installed at key locations around Barcelona, including the Mobile World Congress venue itself. This enables Telefónica to simulate global traffic across all the locations, before and during the event, in order to guarantee quality of the service to its customers.

Telefónica at the MWC:
http://telefonica.com/en/mwc/home/index.shtml

Telefónica at the MWC on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/telefonicamwc