Roamware Eliminates Over 30,000 SIM Boxes in Less than Six Months

[prnewswire] Roamware, Inc., a global leader in mobile roaming software and solutions, today announced the unprecedented uptake of its SIM Box Detector solution launched in third quarter of 2009. The solution enables telecom operators to eliminate unauthorised usage of GSM Gateways to bypass paying toll/interconnect fees. In less than six months Roamware's solution has been already deployed in six operator networks and is in trial stages with over a dozen operators globally.

Rogue international transit carriers use this mechanism to bypass mobile termination and effectively impact the termination revenues of mobile operator. The toll bypass results not only in significant revenue leakage for carriers and mobile operators, but is the source of a variety of service issues including call setup delays, poor voice quality, network congestion, and spectrum management issues.

Dr. John Jiang, CTO and EVP of Product Management commented, "Roamware's SIM Box Detector constitutes of a comprehensive, multi-dimensional quality management solution, which is installed in the core of the operator network. It is able to simulate calls from foreign destinations to a range of numbers within the network and traces the routing of the call to effectively identify SIM box installations on a 24/7 basis in the long term improving network congestion, voice quality and revenues."

Typically, interconnect/termination fees account for 15% of operator revenues, with SIM Boxes in play, operators incur revenue drainage between 5%-20%. Over the past year alone, over half a million unique SIM cards boxes used by GSM Gateway operators around the world have been identified. Roamware estimates that telecom operators lose up to 8 Euros per SIM card used in a SIM box per day, leading to over 100s of millions of Euros in revenue loss.

Dr. Jiang, added, "Today, SIM Boxes are prominent in many parts of the world, including Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. There are many issues that operators face in identifying fraud numbers, including identifying inaccurate SIM card numbers and increased usage of the networks to run tests. Roamware is able to overcome these challenges with a 99.999% accuracy rate in tracking SIM Boxes and blocking the SIM cards on a real time basis. In our engagement with GSM operators over the last six months we have identified and deactivated tens of thousands of SIM Box gateways across regions."

Roamware's SIM Box detector's key features include high accuracy rates, dependable and swift detection, automatic deactivation of SIM Box cards, non-intrusive of network usages reducing the congestion on networks, unlimited testing and usage of MSISDNs and random selection preventing fraudsters from identifying detection patterns.

Roamware Eliminates Over 30,000 SIM Boxes in Less than Six Months