The Hindu Business Line : There's a way...

CDMA-based telephony services do not offer `seamless roaming' to customers when they go abroad to GSM geographies. Software shows a possible solution...

MOBILE telephony operators using the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology — of whom the largest players in the country are Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices — have one big shortcoming in the services that they offer.

Unlike GSM cellular services, CDMA services do not yet allow for seamless roaming, in particular to Europe and the UK, which are GSM geographies.

Both players privately admit that this is indeed a handicap, for many high net worth customers are frequent overseas travellers and they would like clean two-way roaming. By `clean' is meant having to make no arrangements such as getting a separate SIM card before the customer sets out to travel, change of handset, and the like. And, frequent Indian overseas travellers are expected to only increase in number, making their presence on any operator's customer list even more important.

To get the cream of high net worth individuals into its fold is important to any operator. For, generally, such individuals are unconcerned about the bills that they run up and are also good candidates for feeding value-added-services to.

But CDMA operators are not accepting their handicap as their fate. They are working around the technology, seeking ways of offering seamless roaming to their customers. They are not quite there but they are getting closer and closer.

Reliance Infocomm, for instance, already has a solution, but this requires the use of a SIM card, usually taken from the sponsor GSM network, in this case Reliance Telecom, which runs GSM services in the North-Eastern circles in India.

When the Reliance Infocomm customer roams into a GSM network, say in Europe, with his SIM card, he need not change his original Reliance Infocomm India number. Any call to his original number will be delivered to him through a software platform. There is one handicap though, when this customer chooses to call someone, the receiver will not see the original Reliance Infocomm India number as Caller ID, and there is a risk of the receiver not recognising the number and not responding. Roaming to other CDMA networks in the world, of course, does not present the same problem.

Reliance has roaming arrangements with 13 CDMA networks and over 60 GSM networks, and is the first CDMA network in India to offer any kind of international roaming.

Tata Teleservices is yet to announce the commercial availability of international roaming services though it would be offering the service very soon.

There are several telecom solution providers who offer platforms to enable this kind of roaming facility, the well-known international ones being Syniverse, Verisign, Roamware and the like.

However there is one Indian telecom software company that isworking with one of the above-mentioned CDMA majors to offer two-way roaming internationally.

Said the head of this software company: "We are developing a platform which will provide the roaming customer (who will have to get a GSM SIM card, alas) authentication services so that he can effectively use his number for both incoming as well as outgoing calls."

This means that a call made out of a GSM area will still appear to come out of the caller's original number, and is a development over the current handicap of the roamer's number being unrecognisable as his original number. Of course, once the Worldphone, as it is called, is available, a customer can roam worldwide across all networks, whether GSM or CDMA.

Handset makers Motorola, Samsung, LG and Amoi (Chinese handset maker) will be bringing such phones into the market, and they are in the pipeline in the plans of Indian CDMA operators.

Meanwhile the GSM operators are having it very good. Our travelling CEOs and their train of executives, travelling administrative officers and government officials, all use GSM phones when overseas.

kripram@thehindu.co.in

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