Mobile World Congress 2014, Day 2 – Halls Full of Roaming Subscribers

The people were in full force today spread over 8 exhibit halls. There are over 1,700 exhibitors and 70,000 attendees! This is the largest annual mobile networking trade show for the service provider market. It seems that if anyone has anything remotely to do with mobile networks, they are here at this event.

A brief respite before the crowds arrive!

Today, much of our time was spent sharing with customers, partners, and analysts our message about how F5 can help deliver solutions to the service providers to help them provide value to their customers while optimizing, securing, and monetizing their networks at the same time. As the mobile networks evolve with the introduction of 4G LTE along with emerging technologies such as network functions virtualization, it is important for solution partners such as F5 help design and enable architectures to deliver agile and elastic core network capabilities.

Another topic of interest at this year’s show is LTE Roaming as more service providers enable LTE networks and look to enable their subscribers to roam onto different networks as they travel around the world (such as to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress!). Not only do the service providers wish to enable basic voice and data services through their roaming partners, but they want to ensure a high quality of experience for their customers. They need to ensure that their customers will not face the dreaded bill shock when they get back home when they see how much their roaming charges were, while making sure that their customers are connected through the preferred roaming partner’s network and still deliver premium value added services(VAS).

The LTE Roaming Reference Architecture gives the service provides an architecture that shows them how they can deliver optimal roaming services through the use of a reliable, scalable, available, and secure Diameter edge agent (DEA) leveraging the robust diameter signaling protocol. Of course, if you want to learn more, come by our booth at 5G11 in Hall 5 while we are all enjoying the brisk Barcelona weather!