This is a significant milestone, making an 88% improvement in roundtrip latency, enabling international service providers to meet use case demands and create value for customers and partners.
“Critical IoT applications require high-quality and flexible connectivity between devices and premium IoT services hosted in the cloud,” said Marc Halbfinger, CEO, Console Connect.
“Through close cooperation with other IPX providers, this latest PoC proves the industry is able to deliver on its promise to significantly reduce latency for IoT roaming and enable devices to securely connect through local gateways all the way to public clouds.”
The first successful test results were announced in March 2023. The same four members of the GLF IoT working group – Console Connect, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, Orange Wholesale and Telefónica Global Solutions – collaborated again later in 2023 to further improve the quality of roaming connectivity and deliver better PoC results.
The first stage of the PoC proved it is possible to lower roaming latency from a median value of 296 milliseconds between Europe and Asia to 105 milliseconds within Asia.
The GLF Critical IoT workstream demonstrated in 2022, that via local IPX peering and packet data network (PDN) gateways it is possible to further reduce global latency.
“Vital to the success of the PoCs were the simultaneous implementation of both local gateways and local peering,” added Rolf Nafziger, SVP of Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier.
“In the new test scenario of 2023, they were situated even closer to the simulated end user. This allowed a further decrease in roaming latency that is already like the in-country latency level.”
This second stage of the PoC has proven it is possible to further lower roaming latency from 105 milliseconds to just 35 milliseconds between neighbouring Asian countries.
This roaming latency is akin to in-country latencies, proving that roaming connectivity can provide the same latency as the local in-country mobile connectivity.
The measurements were taken using a roaming IoT SIM connecting to compute servers hosted by Google Cloud.
“Tomorrow's IoT use cases, driven by vertical enterprise applications, will require connectivity in a roaming situation that mirrors the speed and quality of in-country mobile networks,” said Emmanuel Rochas, CEO, Orange Wholesale International.
“This PoC marks a pivotal moment in global roaming connectivity, with round-trip latencies divided by almost 9 thanks to a successful carrier’s collaboration.”
The next step for the working is to create a technical and commercial framework to ensure quality of service for international, critical IoT traffic. They will also share the results and include more service providers in the initiative.
“The PoC’s of this year fulfilled the promise made to the market last year,” added Eloy Rodríguez, chief wholesale officer of Telefónica Global Solutions.
“It has reconfirmed the feasibility of low latency roaming connectivity that can facilitate even the most urgent IoT applications – even use cases that literally make a difference between life and death – like connected cars, or autonomous driving."
