Home routing resolved

Originally published by Toni Piehl as LinkedIn article on November 30th, 2022.

Traveling is picking up 

Now that the global pandemic seems to be at least slowing down according to graphs at World Health Organisation (WHO) site and demand for air travel stays strong in the latest International Air Transport Association (IATA) report for September, it is time to think about how you will connect when travelling. Whether you are responsible for the enterprise connectivity solutions for your enterprise’s devices, Internet of Things (IoT) device fleet or you travel as an employee of an enterprise, your mobile data connectivity will behave according to specified standards and it will have use case impacting delays you should be aware of.

Traveling abroad

When travelling abroad all your mobile data connectivity is routed back to your native mobile operator which creates delay. Let me illustrate this with an example.

1. While traveling in Australia you feel the need to get some more energy in between the meetings. To optimise the lunch break you reach in your pocket for your smartphone to search for local restaurant menus just around the corner in Sydney as you try to decide where and what you want to eat.
2. As you start your restaurants menu search, the search arrives in Australian mobile operator’s data center. The mobile operator verifies that you are allowed to use their network but sees that you are just visiting – realising at the same time it has no idea if you can pay for the data charge you are creating. According to international roaming standards the data packets with your menu search are sent back to your native mobile operator where you have the subscription from – in this case to Finland. You expect to soon see the colourful menu with delicate details and mouth watering portions to choose from.
3. Your native mobile operator verifies that you are still their customer and the menu search can be processed and the restaurant menu search is sent to internet – to Australia for searching the local restaurant menu you are anxiously waiting to see. You keep staring at your mobile wondering what happened to it, maybe somehow the hotter climate is causing it to freeze.
4. Once in Australia the menu is found waiting for your request and the menu with delicious details is fetched and sent back to the mobile operator in Finland. Your mind is responding to your thoughts that mobile freezing in warmer temperatures defies all logic and you make a mental note to find out what is causing the apparent poor phone performance.
5. Once the requested menu arrives in mobile operator’s datacenter back in Finland, it is returned to your mobile device back in Australia finally displaying the menu on your mobile device screen for your mouth watering lunch planning.

Latency due to physical distance

This travel back and forth across the globe is called latency, the time between the technical request and response, and is seen and experienced by the user or the system in case of machine to machine communication. The user’s interpretation is that either the phone is acting up or internet is slow or maybe even broken when data is actually traveling at high speed, just the route seems unreasonably configured from end user’s perspective. This is however how operators and network manufacturers at GSMA have specified connectivity back when data roaming started some 20 years ago and this is how it still works today.

Solution to resolve roaming latency

In our team we saw these long delays as a problem which needs to be resolved and developed cloud based SaaS service DBOS.io which resolves the above described home routing problem. The Dynamic BreakOut Service (DBOS) is now integrated and operated by Dent Wireless and allows rule based, dynamically allocated local breakouts for your mobile data connectivity. In short, while using DBOS if you are in Australia your data connection jumps to internet locally in Australia avoiding the long delay caused by data traveling back and forth across the globe and bringing other benefits as well.

Harvard Business Manager article

I will explain more details in the Harvard Business manager‘s latest issue (in German). Direct link to the Ad Special Manager Wissen of the Harvard Business Manager (Special 2023), page 3.