BICS and Airtel Africa boost African roaming
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BICS and Airtel Africa boost African roaming

Belgium’s BICS has signed an agreement with Airtel Africa to improve its roaming services across 17 countries in the African region.

Airtel Africa will deploy a range of BICS services which will allow the operator to monitor inbound and outbound roaming traffic, enhance international SMS traffic revenues, and grow its overall roaming footprint.

“Our range of value-added services will allow Airtel Africa’s operating companies to fix potential quality issues in real time, optimise roaming strategies, and monetise international SMS traffic, improving profitability quickly,” said Clémentine Fournier, regional VP for Africa at BICS.

The solutions include BICS’ SMART Webvision – launched in August last year– the Roaming Hub and Roamfast service, designed to allow for roaming expansion, and its Data Roaming Booster solution which will enable Airtel to avoid unexpected data roaming charges.

“With this roaming value-added service we are able to achieve higher levels of visibility of the performance of our networks, which in turn allows us to improve the quality of our roaming offering,” said André Beyers, chief marketing officer at Airtel Africa.

“The platform also enables us to identify and resolve performance issues in real time to provider higher service levels to our customers.”

BICS has places a heavy focus on African roaming in the last 12 months and last year significantly increased its presence in the region with the launch of three adiitional regional branches.

In October 2013 the Belgian telco partnered with Unitel in Angola for 4G roaming.

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