11. Roundtable WBA (Wireless Broadband Alliance)

On May 14-17, 2007, the 11th WBA Roundtable took place in Goa, India. The topic "Seamless Mobility (Marketing on Wireless Broadband Access and Cooperation with Telco Industry Bodies)" was in focus.

This time, VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited) – a company of the TATA Group ­– invited 20 other companies to this event, including NTT, Telecom Italia, Orange, Telmex, and BT. About 50 people participated; Deutsche Telekom was represented by Helmut Angst (Head of ICSS), Robert Szudra (Product Management), Johann-Georg Gross (Innovation Projects), and Angelos Marvridis (Product Management, TMO).

The objective of the previous Roundtable events was to accelerate roaming agreements through the standardization of important core elements. For this reason, the modules were worked out in various workgroups. Now, cooperation has entered the next phase in the further development of broadband, wireless, Internet access available worldwide: developing the compatibility of various technologies and terminal devices for the numerous services on the one hand and increasing traffic on the other.

For this reason, a new workgroup on "Strategy, Research & Industry Bodies" was convened before the Roundtable in India under the leadership of Johann Georg Gross. 15 members from 11 companies form the core group, which works together with the representatives of other industrial committees, such as FMCA (Fix Mobile Convergence Association), the Wi-Fi Alliance, and GSMA. During the Roundtable, the representatives of these forums took part in a daylong workshop to define the core points of the cooperation, as well as the task packages, responsibilities, and a schedule with the primary objective of combining the work results and strengths of the various committees regarding the topic of "seamless mobility." Regardless of which terminal device the customer has and which technology is presently in use, whether GSM, WiFi, or WiMAX, the end customer should always have access to broadband, wireless Internet access whose use should be just as convenient as the customer's usual connection and settled via the home telephone bill. When a customer leaves a hotspot while traveling, he or she can then access an existing WiMAX network without having to re-enter his or her password or PIN. If several networks exist at one site, software can control the selection of the corresponding network using previously determined criteria that can be adapted again and again.

On the occasion of the Roundtable, Deutsche Telekom signed an important agreement with VSNL: a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) agreement for ICSS's WiFi Roaming Solution product.

Zoom in

Mr. Girish Hiremath, General Manager – Business Development Broadband & Retail Business and Helmut Angst

With this contract, ICSS has purchased access to the approximately 150 hotspot locations of VSNL in India. This aggregated access can then be offered to the connected service providers so that their end customers can roam in the VSNL hotspots. The contract initially has a term of 12 months.

A further planned step in the mutual settlement of business will be a provider agreement that permits the outbound roaming of VSNL end users in the hotspots connected via ICSS.

ICSS and VSNL are already contractual partners: T-Com (and the individual T-Mobile regional companies) and VSNL already have a direct bilateral roaming agreement for public WLAN roaming. This contract is bidirectional; that is, VSNL’s end customers can surf via T-Com’s hotspots and vice versa.

ICSS offers a one-stop-shopping solution instead of numerous bilateral agreements and differentiates itself considerably from the competitors due to this offering.

ICSS WiFi Roaming Solution is a white-label product and offers best quality access to more than 20,000 hotspots worldwide. With the ICSS solution, "newbie" VSNL reaches a critical number of roaming hotspots quickly and pragmatically. In addition, ICSS is regarded as a reliable partner and is very well established in the WBA and on the worldwide WiFi market.