Regional breakout: A next step in the transition to 5G

5G – at least in the radio network ­– is becoming a reality for many operators around the world, but the road to a 5G core network remains a long one. When it comes to roaming, this poses a challenge for operators who, until they can transition to local breakout in the visited network, are routing their subscribers’ data sessions back home in order to manage charges.

For the data-hungry subscriber, this can have an exponential impact on Quality of Service the further afield they travel and the longer the length of the ping back to the home network. By current estimates, the transition to a full 5G core will take at least a decade; as demand for data continues to rise, an immediate solution that helps bridge the gap to local breakout is necessary to increase data roaming speeds, improve Quality of Service and optimize the network.

With its extensive global infrastructure, BICS offers a significant step for operators on the journey to local breakout, with the opportunity to breakout their data sessions regionally in the interim. With public gateways in New York and Ashburn of the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore, and two locations in Belgium, Europe, BICS’ regional breakout service can be used to significantly lower the latency for subscribers roaming all over the world.

Now, instead of routing data roaming sessions back to the home network, operators can route them from the visited network to the internet via the closest of our six nodes located around the world. This ensures data roaming speeds, connectivity times and ping times are as low as possible, improving Quality of Service of their 5G data roaming.

For operators to accommodate the increasing data speeds and volumes demanded by 5G, data roaming must be carefully managed to get the best from the network and prevent overwhelming demand. As part of BICS’ regional breakout service, all data roaming sessions can be fully managed on the home operator’s behalf, including data roaming bundles that are also available for purchase to optimize quality and costs, and to prevent bill shock.

To protect networks during the transition to 5G, data sessions must be throttled in times of peak demand, or to evoke fair usage policies for individual subscribers identified as using huge volumes over sustained periods of time. With BICS’ regional breakout service, roamers benefit from an improved quality of service, while bandwidth is managed and allocated per subscriber for maximum flexibility and efficiency.

To find out more about how BICS can optimize your transition to 5G roaming, contact us today.