Roaming is another area where CSPs can improve the customer experience. According to Juniper Research, roaming data revenue is expected to increase to $31 billion by 2022, rising from $21 billion in 2017, mainly fueled by customers attracted to 'Roam-Like-At-Home' plans or Day Passes. The IoT is expected to account for an additional 20 to 30 percent of total roaming revenue as the digitally connected world takes shape. The IoT will put increasing pressure on the customer experience, particularly as mobile ‘things’ and applications go beyond traditional handsets, such as autonomous cars and wearables, and begin to cross borders. 

Communications service providers can no longer just pass the baton to their roaming partners to manage their customers when they are abroad. Instead, CSPs need to employ the benefits of intelligent monitoring tools that capture data about a subscriber’s quality of experiencewhen they are roaming, down to the individual IMSI and not just the network level. With this level of data, CSPs will have the insights to steer valued customers who experience poor quality service onto better networks, while more quickly identifying the root cause of issues. This helps reduce customer care costs, while also identifying and proactively compensating valued subscribers who had a poor roaming experience. At the same time, some services may require that all of a subscriber's devices roam on the same network, and in such cases, the CSP needs to ensure that they select the best roaming network for each individual subscriber and are able to steer all devices for that subscriber onto the same network.

#2: Avoid leaving money on the table
(especially as business models change)

5G will be a game changer when it comes to the traditional partner ecosystem and the business models that support it. For example, greater collaboration between CSPs and third-party content providers will become commonplace. With these arrangements, however, come a multitude of opportunities for revenue leakage to occur as the digital ecosystem expands beyond traditional telecom providers and the one-size-fits-all service business model is shattered.

Let’s take a ‘Super Bowl of the future’ as an example for how CSPs could be at risk of costly revenue leaks. In this scenario, let’s suppose a content provider has offered three levels of tickets to live stream the event: standard, premium and gold. Standard tickets provide live streaming access to all of the on-field action; premium tickets provide access to the team’s huddle; and gold provides 4K video and Virtual Reality experiences. Next, we assume each tier of service runs on its own network slice and has its own quality of service SLAs and pricing configurations: one for subscribers and one for content partners.

As you can see, network slices will be an important mechanism to support the catalog of new enterprise and consumer applications. However, with all this flexibility comes added complexity. Beyond the basics of provisioning services and managing any upgrades in real-time, CSPs must also measure and rate the content being distributed at each ticket grade to ensure accurate billing and margin analytics. When we add network slices to the mix, where different service level agreements will apply to different slices and different pricing models will depend on specific slice requirements, revenue assurance in the age of 5G has become that much more complex.

In order to ensure SLAs are being met, CSPs require the ability to collect performance data from 5G networks and network functions in real-time. It is not just the home CSP, however, that requires access to this information. In the case of international roaming, the same or similar features of the 5G slice supporting a roaming car should also be available in the visited operator’s domain. Continuity of service when moving between different communication service providers (i.e. international roaming) is an important feature that needs to be provided and assured within the properties of each 5G slice.