Listen to Amit Daniel's views
Amit Daniel VP Marketing & Business Development Starhome (www.starhome.com)

Starhome : one stop shop for roaming solutions

Starhome is the leading roaming solutions provider in the world today serving more than 160+ global customers. Starhome offers a complete package to operators with good services, customised & tailored solutions and flexible business models. Amit Daniel, VP Marketing, Starhome, talked to Telecom India Daily about the company’s activities in and out of India.

How has the journey been so far for Starhome?

Starhome was established 10 years ago. We are the leading providers of roaming solutions for mobile operators. We already have more than 160 mobile operators worldwide. We serve all the leading groups such as Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, AMI and others. Basically what we do is we install our IntelliGate Service Mobility Platform, which is our gateway (GW) at operator premises and that GW is connected to the operators’ different systems to provide a variety of solutions for roaming.

What are the major solutions offered to mobile operators?

We have three main categories of products at Starhome. The first one is related to any thing that deals with Value-added Services for roamers. We have solutions like Home Short Code that enable you to use familiar short codes when you dial your voice mail or customer care; you are connected to the service at home and don’t have to remember the long numbers. We maintain our Global numbering plan database which contains numbering plans of all the operators so we can be on top of any changes made in the industry at all times.

Starhome provides a full range of solutions, such as call completion and correction because many travellers make dialling mistakes when they are travelling abroad. For example, they are using their phone book for dialling, which is not configured to include international prefixes and dialling rules when they are not in home network. Therefore the operator is losing a lot of revenue when people make dialling mistakes and are not aware of how to correct them. We offer a solution, which is deployed at most of our customers, called Intelligent Call Assistant, that basically corrects the dialled number and completes the call seamlessly for the user so he is not even aware that he made a dialling error.

Data usage is increasing and this is what operators will also be looking to handle while the user is roaming. How does Starhome assist operators with data roaming?

We provide lots of solutions around data roaming, and we see the Indian market is also showing lots of interest as well. Operators are looking for ways to offer their subscribers more control over their expenses when they roam out of the country. Bill shock is a frequent situation that users face because they continue to use GPRS or UMTS to download e-mails, or to view You Tube when traveling just like they do at home, with their Blackberrys or iPhones, and suddenly when they return, the charges are much higher than they are accustomed to paying. We offer a Roaming Control solution to counter this problem as it enables operators to offer price packages that give subscribers control over their expenses when they roam. For example a subscriber can buy a package for $10, so he knows he has a certain amount of money to be used abroad. This package can include data, voice and SMS together; it’s not only for data. Once the user is about to exceed that amount, he will be notified by the operator in advance that he is reaching the package limit. He can then choose to purchase a new package or reduce phone usage. This gives the post-paid subscriber the same control as prepaid. We monitor real-time subscriber usage to ensure he gets notification or alerts on time, allowing him to control roaming expenses.

Operators began offering smaller, affordable packages because of the EU regulations, but we see this trend in other regions worldwide such as in India.

How do your services help operators to differentiate themselves from the competition?

We see lots of demand for differentiation, which is important to operators in this competitive market. Some want to promote lower prices, while others want the ability to interact with the end user when he is abroad to offer valuable services such as SMSs, e-mails, videos, and MMS with information that is relevant to the location, user profile, or specific time. This may include mobile marketing campaigns that operators can use to generate revenues from 3rd parties and in turn give greater value to end users. For example, if an Indian traveller lands in the UK and is a frequent flier of a particular company, he can enjoy roaming solutions bundled with mileage on his frequent flier card. We see lots of demand for ideas that will differentiate the operator and give good value to subscribers.

What is your position in the Indian market? What kind of requirements you get from Indian operators?

We are serving big operators in India, and we have different solutions deployed. It’s a very interesting market as the demand comes for both incoming visitors and Indians living abroad. Operators look to optimize their networks to control where their subscribers are roaming and to increase revenues from their roaming agreements. On one hand, if the operator is part of an international group, then they want to make sure their subscribers roam in networks that are part of that group. On the other hand operators in the visited country want to make sure that when subscribers from other countries roam in their network, they will be able to hold them in the network for a longer time and not lose them to competitive networks. And once you capture that subscriber, you need to give him relevant value-added services & solutions that will maximise the revenues during the specific time when he is roaming on your network.

How can operators hold the customer for longer period of time on their network using your solutions?

It really depends. If a Vodafone UK customer visits India, the operator would prefer that the customer roam in the Vodafone India network, and this can be controlled from the home network. However Indian operators can buy a solution called Gateway Location Register, a standard solution recommended by GSMA. It enables an operator to retain a visitor for a longer period of time once he registers on the network by not allowing the effect of better reception to steer him away to another network. GLR basically acts as a VLR in the network, eliminating international signalling between the visited and home networks, and therefore reduces the probability that the home network will steer that subscriber to another network.

What kind of specific solutions do you have for large Prepaid markets like India?

The percentage of prepaid subscribers is high in India and this presents a challenge for operators to offer seamless roaming on any network with which they have signed a roaming agreement. The problem in achieving this is that operators needs to add CAMEL at the home network side and test it with every visited network so this is something that is not unilateral; it relies on the cooperation of other operators. The number of CAMEL agreements in the Indian market is very low in terms of deployment and the coverage that can be offered. This poses a problem for operators to offer roaming on any network to their prepaid subscribers. One of the solutions that Starhome offers is Prepaid Anywhere which enables Home operators to offer all prepaid subscribers the ability to roam freely on any network regardless of CAMEL deployments. On the network side, we are capable of monitoring the credit of the customer - if he exceeds his credit, he will be blocked just like at home. The solution is based on an application that we install on the SIM card. This solutions is of high interest in emerging markets like India because prepaid is a major revenue source for Indian operators. We work closely with each operator’s new or existing system, adopting specific solutions according to their needs and requirements.

What are key differentiators for Starhome?

Our solutions are based on the Managed Service mode instead of a model in which most of the vendors only install the platform and then disconnect from the operator. Once we install the gateway, we control it using our Global Services Operations Centre which monitors the entire solution, both hardware & software installed at the operator site 24x7. We are able to see real time statistics, any alarms there may be, or if an upgrade is needed; and we do everything remotely. This provides major value to operators because it gives them freedom to outsource the maintenance and support to us which is not his core competency to manage. This is a major example of significant value that nobody else can offer and suits the Indian market.

What kind of future strategy will Starhome follow in the world’s fastest growing telecom market?

I think we will continue working closely with operators, customising solutions for the Indian market. India is large country and any single operator from the operational perspective is working with many entities that cover different regions in India. In that respect we have deployed centralised solutions so operators don’t have to deploy solutions for each small entity to cover different areas. This is cost beneficial for the operators that are centralised and serve all entities with coverage throughout India. We also bring expertise from other markets that can be shared with the Indian market. There are solutions we have implemented in Europe or other markets, as sometimes implementation in the Indian market is late for some of these solutions. We see lots of activity in terms of sharing business case studies that were prepared in different markets. The success in the Indian market is mainly based on lots of discussion and brainstorming between the operators and our team to understand their needs along with using examples from other markets.

Emerging markets favour revenue sharing arrangements. What has been your response to these models?

Starhome has worked with revenue sharing models for the last 10 years. We have implemented them not only in India but also in other countries. We do this for many of our solutions because we are confident of the business case. This is the reason lots of operators like to work with us because we are very flexible in offering operational and financial models that are out of the box and not standard.

What are the challenges that the operators need to address?

The main challenge we see operators facing is that pricing as a differentiator will be less effective as compared to the past. Operators need to find creative ways to ensure that roaming subscribers use all types of communication. Also it requires customisation in terms of matching different segmentation requirements. Once you can profile the services that the subscriber uses, the value is greater for him. The main challenge is to identify the different segments served and to tailor the offerings to successfully promote them to subscribers.