Today, instant commentary on experiences is crucial for travellers and could be pivotal to French Polynesia’s post-Covid-19 tourism industry. Vodafone FP supports the tourist industry using a flexible international roaming solution and a reliable mobile infrastructure. Doing so allows island visitors to share their heavenly experience with the rest of the world.
The partnership between Vodafone FP and Squire Technologies came about in 2013. The newly launched Vodafone FP discovered an interconnect issue with an onward carrier and needed a quick solution with future functionality and compatibility.
Mobile networks are all unique mixes of signal transfer points (STPs), controllers, routing agents, and gateways, often creating headaches during network upgrades. Delays happen when big vendors try to deploy their standardised products into these convoluted core networks. Similarly, problems can emerge when deploying new features into these standardised big vendor products and can lead to lock-in for mobile network operators (MNOs).
A big vendor supplied the previous roaming solution in Vodafone FP’s network. It lacked flexibility and limited the potential for international roaming and Vodafone FP’s ability to adapt to market changes.
Squire Technologies is a focused vendor that specialises in signalling solutions. While big vendors offer a variety of standardised products that take ages to deploy, Squire Technologies can deploy agile solutions in a fraction of the time.
To solve Vodafone FP’s problem, Squire Technologies supplied an agile, scalable gateway with complex routing and high availability. The gateway solved the interconnect issue with Vodafone FP’s onward carrier and opened the path to more options for the MNO. In 2014, Squire Technologies upgraded the gateway to a full STP, capable of SS7 to 4G LTE and IMS network interworking. It enables multi-network connectivity and routing and optimised Vodafone FP’s core network, making it future-ready.
The project’s success led the MNO to re-engage Squire Technologies in 2017, adding a Diameter Signalling Controller (DSC) with a Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) and a Diameter Edge Agent (DEA). The DSC maximises LTE and VoLTE coverage for customers, while the DRA reduces network complexity, and the DEA provides secure authentication, authorisation, and subscriber policy exchange.
Visitors now experience enhanced coverage on the islands, and effective mobile roaming will be essential for plans to boost tourism in French Polynesia.
While Bora Bora has capped tourist numbers to limit the ecological impacts of super cruise liners, the government aims to nearly triple annual tourists from 219,000 visitors in 2022 to 600,000 by 2033. That is a lot of extra mobile phone connections. Thankfully, Vodafone FP can manage the increased traffic thanks to the flexibility and forward and backwards facing capabilities of the Sigla platform’s functions.
