COVID-19 continues to be a topic of discussion for businesses around the world, and we understand that ensuring continuity and employee safety while keeping business stable is a full-time effort. That’s why we’re working diligently to ensure our nearly 900 mobile operator customers have all the data they need at their fingertips to make informed decisions which keep their businesses running as smoothly as possible.
One of the most common requests we receive from our mobile operator customers is to better understand roaming trends specific to their network and roaming partner relationships. Our Total Visibility and Signaling solutions, which provide centralized network visibility and monitoring of all roaming traffic, and our Clearing and Settlement solution, which helps our operator customers better manage and track their roaming partnerships, have been crucial roaming reporting and monitoring tools during this time.
As we help our customers to gain a better understanding of their roaming trends, we also realize that, as the largest provider of roaming solutions, we have the ability to educate the market on total roaming traffic patterns around the globe. So, we pulled roaming traffic data from our systems to illustrate the top global roaming trends during COVID-19. Before we dive into that, I’ll highlight the roaming macrotrends we’ve observed year over year as a baseline for our COVID-19 observations.
Seasonality in travel trends are driving on-and off-season roaming traffic
Every year, consistently, we observe the following roaming trends across the globe:
However, with COVID-19, we have seen a change in the typical roaming traffic trends above. As we dive into the data, you’ll see that as stay at home orders and social distancing practices were mandated around the globe, roaming traffic also dropped extensively.
A global roaming traffic view of COVID-19 effects
Global roaming traffic remained consistent through January 2020, and volumes were increasing year- over-year through February 2020. However, we began to see a decrease in volumes month-over-month beginning in February 2020 corresponding with global travel restrictions and stay at home orders. As noted in the seasonal trends readout in the first chart above, we usually see large spikes in traffic for spring break travels. However, March and April realized declines due to the pandemic affecting roaming revenues for many mobile network operators.
This is just a snapshot of the trends we’re able to see on our roaming platforms. This same data is available by region, and of course, our customers can access data specific to their roaming traffic. If you’re interested in a readout of what we’re seeing on a regional basis or want to discuss any of our roaming products, contact us here and we’ll schedule a 1:1: session to meet.
We’ll do everything we can to support you and your roaming business during this difficult time.
Leah Alanis is a Senior Director of Product Management at Syniverse. In her current position, Leah leads the company’s Business Intelligence and Analytics portfolios, focused on driving new business development initiatives around the globe. In her more than 20 years at Syniverse, she’s held many different positions, including managing a global team for the company’s customer call center, providing second-level support of hardware, software and network, and designing, developing and deploying Syniverse’s prepaid wireless platform and network automation tools for the SS7 network. In addition, she has also previously led Syniverse’s global SS7 network support and engineering teams, the Syniverse global implementations team, and oversaw the execution of pre-sales technical activities in her role as Director of Solutions Engineering, prior to being named to her current post.
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