As Melita’s Wholesale Manager responsible for the connectivity that enables our subscribers to make/send/receive international calls/SMSs and roam in foreign networks, I had the pleasure to attend, along with our team member, Amanda Sacco, one of the GSMA’s events, called WAS. The conference brought together the latest innovations and leading-edge technology alongside the most current influential visionaries in the industry.
The GSMA has many different working groups focusing on specific topics, such as fraud prevention, networks and, technology, where participants share best practices and the GSMA gets feedback from the operators to standardise important processes.
The Wholesale Agreements & Solutions Group (WAS) is of particular interest to me because it focuses on Roaming interworking (Operator-to-Operator, Operator-to-Service Provider and Operator-to-Hub interoperability) to provide GSMA members with consistent, reliable sets of standards and guidelines for Operators to offer quality mobile service for their customers.
Within this group we work on bringing new mobile technologies to a roaming stage, the GSMA along with Mobile Operators define standards for billing, technology-interworking and even legal contracts.
Participating in this event helps me to keep in touch with current and future roaming
partners and vendors, as well as to keep updated with the latest standards and
trends in the industry.
Our time was spent discussing new agreements to benefit both providers and subscribers, attending different keynotes on recent technologies such as 5G, VoLTE, M-IoT, and their implications on technical interconnection, operability, and wholesale billing. Meeting with vendors that showcase their latest services and products.
The Wholesale Agreements & Solutions Group meets twice a year, Every meeting is held in a different city, and usually in a different continent. In this occasion we met at the “Principe Felipe” Science Museum, in the City of Arts & Sciences in beautiful Valencia, Spain. During this meeting the emphasis was more on new technologies (5G, VoLTE, M-IoT) as demand grows to have these technologies available also while travelling, and in the case of M-IoT, the demand grows as fast as more devices get shipped around the world.
Besides the pleasure of learning about the future of roaming, IoT, RCS, and much more it is always a delight to finally meet the people that I spend hours talking to over the phone and email, face to face, and keep in touch with old friends of the industry from all over the world.
