Brussels – Belgium, 27th June 2013: BICS, a global provider of wholesale carrier services, today announced its IPX platform enabled Swisscom and South Korean operators to perform the first intercontinental 4G roaming connection over IPX, between Europe and Asia, confirming its role as a leading provider of LTE roaming solutions. 

Mobile data roaming abroad is becoming increasingly popular, due to the increasing adoption of LTE services, demand Swisscom and the South Korean operators wanted to address. 

Through the BICS IPX platform, the operators have now launched the new connection for customers, allowing those roaming in Switzerland and South Korea to access 4G/LTE services. In early July the roaming facility will be extended to customers in Canada and Hong Kong. 

The fast expansion of LTE services, which now covers 100 million subscribers worldwide, is challenging for operators as it requires a brand new roll-out of technical interconnections and commercial agreements between all mobile networks to make it work, supported by a completely new all-IP international signalling infrastructure.

By being the first European operator to implement an intercontinental LTE roaming facility, Swisscom has clearly demonstrated its innovative company culture. 

“We have not only taken the lead in expanding 4G/LTE in Switzerland, now we are also at the forefront internationally, leveraging on the best-in-class BICS IPX platform for LTE roaming,” says Marc Furrer, Head of International Roaming at Swisscom. “We are proud of having enabled Europe’s first intercontinental roaming relation because it shows our ability to innovate.” 

"Today 4G is being deployed in more than 175 networks and in 70 countries, it offers extremely fast data exchange and mobile users travelling abroad are demanding the same number of services and same level of quality as they have at home,” says Mikaël Schachne, VP Mobile Data Business at BICS. 

“With our LTE Signalling & IPX Transport, we enable operators such as Swisscom and the South Korean operators to offer global 4G roaming for their subscribers. We are convinced that they soon will be followed by many other operators worldwide.”

To reduce the complexity of implementing LTE, BICS offers a full suite of services allowing fast and easy roll-out of LTE, seamless 2G/3G/4G worldwide roaming experiences, interoperability with other networks, full traffic monitoring, alerting and troubleshooting to the highest reliability and quality of service.