Speakers: Arul Vaz, Senior Business Manager
What is permanent roaming?
Arul Vaz: Permanent roaming is a situation where a device or a mobile phone is connected to a network outside the home network for an extended period of time. As a way of an example, your device which is from Spain could be roaming in Germany for a longer period of time. And then the German networks considers this device to be permanent roaming.
How does permanent roaming impact IoT projects?
Arul Vaz: Great question. Large global IoT deployments often rely on permanent roaming across the world. And why is that? Devices are typically manufactured in one country and are shipped across to different countries for activation and use. Of late we've observed countries such as China US, Brazil, and many more introducing permanent roaming restrictions. Now these restrictions create issues for connected businesses and it impacts the quality of multi-country deployment for their IoT devices - issues such as high data cost, poor quality of connectivity, management complexity, and also the device being barred from the local network, which no customer wants.
How BICS can help customers to have a scalable solution?
Arul Vaz: BICS' SIM for Things is uniquely positioned to help IoT companies, especially OEMs, in solving permanent roaming challenges. We do it in three ways. The first, we have a multi IMSI approach where we set up a device with a single profile, but with multiple IMSI. Second, we partner with local mobile operators and therefore use a local IMSI to help comply with permanent roaming regulations for that country. And third, all this is beautifully incorporated into an intelligent applet which automatically selects the most appropriate IMSI in each country. This, coupled with having the simplicity of using the same portal, the same API, and the same connectivity management platform, makes BICS unique.
