BICS, which provides global roaming services for operators, has begun working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide lower-latency roaming.
This new cloud-based roaming service is available to mobile operators, and it targets end-user customers that require consistent, low-latency internet both in their home countries and abroad. Some examples of target customers would be companies that provide gaming, streaming media or large data transfers.
BICS already has a global backbone and points of presence. But Jorn Vercamert, VP of Customer Solutions at BICS, told Fierce that the addition of AWS’s global cloud network will allow BICS to provide roaming services in a more granular way, targeting customers who especially need low latency roaming.
“We are carrying roughly 50% of the data roaming traffic across the world for many partners,” said Vercamert. “The creation with Amazon is looking at the roaming traffic and understanding what really needs truly low latency.”
BICS is preparing for the future where consumers play bandwidth-hungry games on their mobile phones, while roaming. Or where artificial intelligence (AI) applications could place huge demands on roaming.
“We are co-creating a solution that enables us to break out the data as fast as possible to the relevant data center,” said Vercamert. “It’s expanding granularity and capillarity to break out traffic as close as possible to where the data sits and make data as fast as possible."
The service is enabled by AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), in addition to BICS’ self-developed Packet Data Network (PDN) Gateway-based internet termination edge sites.
BICS declined to say whether it already has customers for this new low-latency roaming. Vercamert did say that it’s helping mobile operators “to make a proposition to enterprises” in relevant situations.
BICS is also working with global operators to facilitate 5G standalone roaming. It was the first company to announce a 5G SA roaming test when it demonstrated a successful roaming connection between the Belgian mobile operator Proximus and stc Kuwait. That connection was the first of its kind to be completed in a non-lab environment.