Cellular number page phone white

Cellular roaming is big business. It takes in $2.1 billion in revenues annually, according to the latest Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) figures. Roaming revenue growth has been in double digits since 1990.

Those numbers are even more impressive when considering how little the cellular industry has done to make roaming a valuable service to most consumers.

Taking an AMPS handset on the road is the most likely way to have the phone cloned and to have fraudulent charges appear the following month. Technical measures to block the problems have been inadequate, industry executives admit.

One of the most common antifraud measures - pre-call personal identification number (PIN) dialing - is inconvenient, especially for the unlucky customer that forgets his PIN while on the road. It can take three or four calls to the local carrier, the home carrier and points in between before a new PIN can be issued. Furthermore, PINs are a temporary solution. Cellular crooks will have no trouble defeating them within the next few years.

On top of all this inconvenience is the cost of roaming, which amounts to a steep increase over home rates under many of the current roaming agreements. By now, hundreds of thousands of cellular customers must be conditioned to leave their phones at home when they travel.

"Think how powerful it would be if you could provide [customers] the same level of service on the road as when they are at home," said Tim McChesney, CEO of MobiLink, at the recent "Optimizing Roaming Operations" conference in San Francisco organized by the Institute for International Research.

Fortunately, steps are being taken to solve these problems. MobiLink, a consortium of U.S. and Canadian B-side carriers, has developed and is deploying a technology that enables customers to contact their home carriers' customer service offices while on the road by dialing a star code - "*611," "*711" or "*811," depending on the roamer's home carrier. MobiLink research has found that the majority of roaming-related problems and inquiries are solved most quickly by the home carrier.

New and hopefully more effective fraud detection and control technologies are ready for deployment, as an upcoming CTIA white paper will show in great detail (see story on page 5). These solutions will not be inexpensive. A combination of solutions, such as pre-call authentication and "RF fingerprinting" likely will be needed to provide truly secure links.

Wireless intelligent network technology, expected to be a cornerstone of broadband personal communications service (PCS), also is being developed to improve cellular roaming, with fraud prevention systems, improved call-forwarding, call-screening, number portability and other features.

In the future, "roaming is not an option, it is a requirement," McChesney said. Perhaps, but do most cellular carriers really see it that way?

The cellular industry, after several years of A/B-side competition, faces potential competition from more than a half dozen new signals per market broadband PCS, mobile satellites, enhanced specialized mobile radio. They feel the pressure to install value-added features for local customers, while roaming continues to grow, no matter how much it is neglected.

This column has referred in the past to the "PACS Edge" system, which is designed to provide dazzling, low-cost broadband PCS services to consumers in their home markets. When they roam, the phone reverts to AMPS, and all the pitfalls associated with it.

Hopefully carriers will see the benefits of investing in high-quality AMPS roaming service as well. In the fractionalized digital cellular era, it is likely to be the primary roaming medium for a very long time.

(Randy Sukow, editor of Phillips Business Information's Wireless Data News, 301/340-7788, ext. 2700; e-mail, rsukow@phillips.com.)