India 4G roaming spikes 3,300% – “You’re welcome,” says Syniverse

4G roaming
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Inter-regional 4G roaming traffic from India has grown by a staggering 3,300% year-over-year, according to data from Syniverse, which is taking partial credit for the spike.

The data was measured by analyzing global roaming traffic traversing the Syniverse platform, which supports 4G roaming for India, including clearing and settlement, and an IPX network that interconnects 1,000 service providers. That global footprint is critical to enabling further 4G proliferation, said Himanshu Goel, VP and managing director of India, Middle East and Africa at Syniverse.

“Syniverse is proud to have played a pivotal role in driving this quadruple-digit growth in outbound 4G roaming, which demonstrates significant progress toward achieving technological advancement goals in the region while delivering the customer experiences that India’s mobile users demand,” he said.

It also helps that the number of 4G LTE devices shipped into India grew 80% in 2017, Goel added, citing figures from CyberMedia Research.

“As a result, India is poised for explosive communications growth, as demonstrated by these impressive growth numbers and reinforced through the Digital India initiative as well as the government’s recently launched draft of the National Digital Communications Policy 2018,” Goel said.

Meanwhile, Goel insists that the Syniverse platform is also “a critical foundation for ushering in the country’s digital transformation” in preparation for next-generation technologies like 5G, VoLTE, rich mobile messaging, smart cities, and the IoT.

“Many of these services will need the security, interconnection, roaming, and interoperability that only an IPX network provides as people and things move around India and the rest of the world,” he said.

However, despite the boost in 4G roaming, the Syniverse study also revealed that more than 70% of the country’s outbound roaming traffic is still traversing legacy network technologies like 3G or even 2G, underscoring that there is still more work to be done by operators.

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