TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) revealed on Thursday that Turkcell has been using its IPX solutions to enable 4G roaming.
The Turkish telco has been using TSIC’s IPX-based diameter signalling service since the end of 2014. It is an interesting case because Turkcell has yet to launch 4G services in its home market, and yet its customers can roam onto 4G networks when they travel abroad.
"Turkcell uses TeliaSonera International Carrier’s IPX network to establish secure and high performance 4G roaming services to subscribers in visited networks," said Elif Yenihan Kaya, director of network planning at Turkcell, in a statement.
According to TSIC, 10 million Turks travel outside the country each year.
"[I] am impressed with how our teams worked together to enable a 4G roaming service for a non-4G network operator," said Matthew Jones, head of mobile solutions at TSIC. "It’s a first for TSIC and Turkcell, an excellent example of innovation."
The partnership currently enables 4G roaming on 31 partner networks in 29 countries, and is expected to expand further to include more operators in more countries in due course.
Turkey plans to auction paired and unpaired spectrum for 4G services by the end of May. The government has set a minimum price of €2.3 billion for frequencies in the 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz bands.
Turkcell has been busy conducting 4G trials, and on Monday it announced that it has tested LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation (CA) in partnership with Ericsson, reaching a peak connection speed of 450 Mbps.
It also tested what it claims is ‘enriched’ voice over LTE (VoLTE), which adds communication features like mid-call file-sharing. Services like this have always been supported by the VoLTE standard, but are not always included as a feature in commercial VoLTE services.
