RoamPoint is a division of The Cloud, a privately held London-based WiFi network operator with 5,000 hotspots in the UK, and pan-European ambitions, having just acquired a network in Germany and set up another in Sweden. A barrier to WiFi roaming has traditionally been the need for each service provider to maintain peer-to-peer connections to all their roaming partners, so in March last year we set up RoamPoint as a physical hub to enable roaming agreements, said Niall Murphy, CTO of The Cloud.
The hub provides authentication, service control, and billing, between the various telcos and hotspot operators, and by acquiring the privately held Excilan, RoamPoint adds 17 carriers and 47 WiFi networks around Europe. We have roughly the same number of relationships, with the difference that RoamPoint belongs to The Cloud, which has the largest hotspot network in Europe, said Murphy.
RoamPoint also said it has signed a deal with Luxembourg-based GSM roaming hub Mach Sarl, which is designed to broaden the number of GSM operators offering WiFi services internationally. This partnership will effect a sea change in the WLAN marketplace globally, said RoamPoint MD Damien Brady. By combining Mach’s strong relationships with GSM operators and RoamPoint’s expertise in authentication services and access to a significant WLAN footprint, we offer a compelling proposition that will enable mobile operators to complete their mobility service portfolios.
From Mach’s point of view, meanwhile, the development of WLAN aggregation and roaming services has been a natural extension of our current core inter-operator solutions business, said chief business development officer Allan Jakobsen. We believe that the demand for ease of use, billing, settlement, revenue assurance, and fraud management operated by Mach for mobile roaming also applies to WLAN roaming. To that extent, RoamPoint, providing expertise in authentication and very appealing footprint, presented itself as the ideal partner to provide our customers with a fully integrated solution.
