Growth fuelled by rapidly accelerating mobile data usage
Madrid, 8th May 2012 – Leading multilateral roaming hub provider, Link2One, today announced that it welcomed 6 new operators and a larger group representing 17 operators on to its service in the first three months of 2012. With a membership of more than 230 networks in more than 90 countries, the world’s fastest growing, independent, multilateral GSM/3G roaming hub is now one of the largest of its kind in the world.
Much of Link2One’s impressive overall growth can be attributed to its rapid growth in data roaming traffic. In 2011, the roaming hub provider launched more than 2000 new GPRS relationships and experienced 94 per cent data traffic growth. This growth is set to continue, with worldwide mobile data traffic set to increase 18-fold over the next five years, according to a Cisco study.
Ralf Weigand, General Manager at Link2One, commented: “Link2One is already the fastest-growing roaming hub in the world, implementing more than 1000 new roaming relationships each month. We are also now one of the largest hubs of this kind in the world; the combined subscriber base of our operator customers now exceeds 1 billion worldwide. This means that new operator customers joining the Link2One hub can quickly launch a comprehensive roaming business that provides more global coverage than any other hub.”
Paul Merry, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, commented: “The hubbing market continues to grow, largely driven by the growth in data roaming and the need for operators to extend roaming services into the prepaid user base. We see Link2One occupying a leading position in this space with its Open Connectivity hub. More and more operators are seeing the value of joining hubs as they provide a highly cost-effective and rapid means for developing a roaming business. For these reasons, there is still much room for growth within the hubbing market for vendors such as Link2One that are able to provide an effective service that delivers the right SLA’s and coverage reach to customers.”
The management and expansion of roaming services and relationships can be costly and time consuming – a situation set to become increasingly complex with the additional challenge of providing maximum roaming coverage for voice services, CAMEL, GPRSand 3G. Link2One provides a hub framework of multilateral roaming agreements for data, prepaid, voice and 3G services. The hub benefits operators by providing a ‘plug and play’ roaming business, which allows them to reduce time to market for roaming services. Uniquely, the Link2One hub also provides operators with access to a single financial and clearing settlement pool with integrated payments. Operators greatly benefit from this significantly simplified approach to roaming, which allows them to more quickly and profitably grow and expand into new markets.
-ENDS-
About Link2One
Founded in February 2008, Link2One is the largest and fastest growing, independently-owned, multilateral GSM/3G roaming hub. It provides signalling, clearing and settlement, plus partner connectivity for network operators worldwide. In addition, the Link2One Roaming Hub provides new connectivity services on an ongoing basis. Its multilateral approach enables operators to have worldwide coverage for voice, data, SMS and CAMEL with just one agreement and one link to the Link2One Hub. Link2One is a joint venture between MACH and Telefonica. For more information, visit: www.l2one.com
Contact:
Link2One
Eileen Preston, Global PR Manager
[email protected] +44 07860 456 193