Welcome to the ITU International Mobile Roaming
Cost Analysis Tool
A tool designed to help you forecast the cost of international mobile roaming compared to domestic mobile
This sample tool is based on the
2015 ITU-T Guide for NRAs on IMR cost analysis available here..
This tool is designed to help forecast the cost of international mobile roaming voice calls compared to domestic mobile voice calls.
The tool covers
voice communications and is available in a basic version and an enhanced version.
Click below to get access. Please note that the ITU does not store any information provided through the tool: once you have finished using it and have noted your results, simply click on the reset button.
About the tool:
- The aim of this website is to provide NRAs an online tool to calculate the costs
of international roaming in order to illustrate the principles set out in the ITU-T
Guide for NRAs on the subject, published in September 2015.
- The tool provides an estimation based on the operational and infrastructure costs
for voice traffic only, but IOT wholesale margins for termination between MNOs are
not included.
Key Assumptions:
The following assumptions are made in order to ensure the simplicity of the tool:
- Assumption 1: It is reasonable to consider the roaming call cost as that of an
off-net domestic call, plus an international long distance segment between MNOs.
The off-net retail price is taken as the domestic on-net price plus the retail uplift
for termination by another MNO – in this case one in a visited country. The actual
cost to the visited MNO would be lower. Further, if NRAS are able to exchange information
on actual MNO termination costs, this assumption could be made far more accurate.
- Assumption 2: In order to add the visited country MNO’s actual additional costs
of roaming, it is assumed that it is possible to simply double the roaming costs
of the home MNO. If NRAS are able to exchange information on actual MNO costs, this
assumption could be made far more accurate.
- Assumption 3: International transit costs would be at the wholesale level of bulk
settlement rate agreements for long distance which are low compared to the domestic
mobile rates for voice or data or SMS. And so the retail price increment paid by
the roaming subscriber is here considered as close to zero for simplicity. In reality,
the cost for wholesale global calling would be a small extra percentage of the domestic
rate, especially when least cost routing, arbitrage and tromboning are used to reduce
the termination rates charged to the MNO. It can be assessed more accurately if
information on these rates is available to the NRA, probably using an average benchmark
over a year for termination rates between specific operators in the different countries.
- Assumption 4: The actual operational and infrastructure costs can be simplified
to fall under ten major headings, as given in the following table.
Note: This sample tool can be also used with traffic figures, for roaming and domestic volumes, if known, to estimate the cost per unit of traffic.
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