Aicent, WorldCell and CDMA roaming on GSM networks

Very neat indeed. I got this news in from the chaps at Aicent who’re working with WorldCell to jointly fix the CDMA roaming issue.

Across on the planet, everyone and their dog is using GSM. This poses a problem for the North American networks that have standardised on the entirely different CDMA protocol (often looked upon as a backward platform by us GSMers, when, in fact, depending on your perspective, the opposite is possibly more accurate).

Your CDMA subscribers want to roam internationally. So you need to implement some brain-surgeon-level interoperability to make this happen. This is what Aicent’s doing with it’s eXchange technology — working with WorldCell, they’re enabling subscribers of TELUS, the largest CDMA operator in Canada, to roam on GSM around the world. Nifty.

Here’s a bit more on what’s going on:

Aicent, Inc. announced today that WorldCell, a leading provider of turnkey technology solutions to wireless operators, has selected two of Aicent’s Roaming eXchange services for the company’s inter-standard data roaming offering.

WorldCell’s Inter-Standard Roaming (ISR) service allows travelers with service on one type of cellular phone network to use data services such as email and mobile Internet on their mobile phones when using cellular networks of a different type, greatly extending their ability to stay connected worldwide.

WorldCell offers wireless operators a turnkey solution to extend service beyond their coverage area, while eliminating the barriers to cross-protocol roaming. Aicent’s CDMA Roaming eXchange (CRX) and GSM Roaming eXchange (GRX) services are critical components of WorldCell’s network architecture, giving WorldCell global reach for inter-standard roaming between networks based on CDMA – the most popular mobile standard in North America – and GSM – the most popular mobile standard in the rest of the world.

More at Aicent.com.