GSM Roaming ECOWAS roots for one SIM card

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Recognising the importance of cross border and overall telecommunications connectivity as the key to the economic and social development and integration of the West Africa sub-region, ECOWAS Secretariat, last week, organised a Regional Telecommunications Forum on Roaming and Cross-boarder Connectivity.

It would be recalled that heads-of-state and government of ECOWAS nations, as far back as 1997, called on cellular phone operators in the sub-region to sign roaming agreements in order to facilitate seamless communications across all the 16 ECOWAS countries.

This was in recognition of the limited roaming facilities in the ECOWAS region, despite improvements in mobile operations.
As a result of that call, some of the 37 GSM service providers in the 16 countries that make up ECOWAS have signed several bilateral roaming arrangements among themselves.

“The present arrangement among service providers is such that there are bilateral arrangements between operators in one country and another, and it is usually for post paid subscribers,” said Dr Moyosoye Afolabi, Director of Computer Centre, ECOWAS secretariat.

Besides, he said the subsisting bilateral arrangement between operators does not take care of the pre-paid subscribers who incidentally make up over 95 per cent of the GSM subscriber’s base in West Africa.

While lamenting the inadequacies of the present arrangement, Dr. Afolabi said, “Even I myself use pre-paid services and it means I cannot enjoy the present roaming arrangement and as a result, I have 12 different GSM SIM cards for different service providers, to enable me make calls whenever I travel to those countries. “I have four SIM cards for Nigeria, one for Benin and one for Togo, where I’ve lived for 15 years. I have two for Ghana, two for Cote d’Ivoire; I have for Senegal and another for Burkina Faso, but I want to throw all of them away and just make use of only one.”

He said one of the focuses of the forum is to find the means to go beyond the current bilateral agreement. According to him, the vision of the ECOWAS secretariat is that the entire ECOWAS citizens should be able to use only one SIM card while travelling across the sub-region.

He said the ECOWAS Secretariat wants a regional arrangement in which there would be a clearinghouse where all the calls from all operators, regardless of their country of operations would be processed.

He explained that the clearinghouse arrangement would be market-driven and voluntary, such that the operators would be persuaded to join the clearing hub, based on the utility value they would derive from it.

Representatives of the World Bank, the United State’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the International Telecommunications Union, (ITU) were also at the forum. They joined the GSM service providers and the regulators to help look at all the issues regarding the roaming arrangement. These issues include: payment, infrastructure, the modalities and even the laws that need to be changed, to make roaming possible.

Representative of MTN Nigeria Communications Limited, one of the biggest GSM service provides in the region, Demola Eleso, who is also the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the company, said with more and more pre-paid subscribers emerging all over the world, pre-paid service for international roaming has become a necessity.

According to him, the quest of GSM subscribers to be reached anywhere around West Africa with one SIM card and one number, regardless of whether they are on prepaid or postpaid arrangements, is not misplaced.
He disclosed that most GSM service providers have bilateral postpaid roaming agreements between themselves. For example, he disclosed that MTN has agreements with 10 operator networks in eight countries out of the 36 GSM operators in 16 countries within the sub-region.

“Our customers on the postpaid platform can use their phone SIM cards and number whenever they travel to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.”

Eleso said some solutions for prepaid roaming are already available. He said these include USSD-based call back solution and SS-based solutions.
According to him, CAMEL-based solutions are technically and commercially the best solutions choice for prepaid roaming.

USSD-based call back prepaid roaming

This is a SIM card-based roaming solution that converts outgoing mobile-originated roaming calls into incoming mobile terminating calls.
The solution is interoperable with any GSM network using standard protocols and roaming agreements. Subscribers can use the service for national calls in visited countries, calls to their home country, including service numbers and for international calls around the globe.

This system enables use of the same prepaid services abroad, that are used in the home network, including seamless use of the personal phone book, prepaid account access, voicemail, directory enquiry, customer care numbers and 0800 and 0900 numbers.

If the subscriber is outside their home network – roaming on a third party network – the set-up of a call will be managed by the an application embedded in the SIM card and the home operator’s back-end system. The roaming mobile subscriber’s called number initiates a trigger to the home operator switch. The application on the mobile device triggers the back-end system either by an SMS or a USSD message. The back-end system then sets up a call to the subscriber directly. The subscriber manually accepts the incoming call when the handset rings. The switch will then set up a call to the destination number or value added service (VAS) platform and instantly connects the two.
Osondu Nwokoro, Econet representative at the event, said prepaid roaming in West Africa, would bridge the problems of shortfall of fixed line in the sub-region. According to him, the pre paid roaming, when adopted, would also enhance the balance sheets of the operators because it will afford them the opportunities of making additional revenues from cross-border calls.

Similarly, Nwokoro said it would afford the government of ECOWAS countries more money in form of tax from the transactions. And for the subscribers, he said the joy of using only one SIM card and one single line number across the sub-region is not quantifiable.