20060524 VSWG Conference Call Minutes

Call Date/Time: Wednesday, 24 May - 2200 UTC, 1500 PDT

[edit] Agenda

There was no formal agenda for this call. The focus of the call was the Coverage Exchange Initiative

Representatives from the following companies were on the call:

Summary slides: General consensus was that the summary slides previously circulated did not provide enough detail to successfully request commitment to the initiative from senior management. Participants were wary of presenting to management without yet having answers to the kinds of questions that they would be asked. Much of the rest of the call was devoted to discussing those areas which are still to be resolved.

Server: Confirm that our preferred end result will be some form of centralized server acting as a repository.

Distribution Rules: Assuming the coverage information is stored on a central server, what governs appropriate access to the information? Suggestion is that each carrier would authorize their roaming partners to access that carrier's coverage. In some cases (particularly domestic roaming), a roaming partner may not be allowed to roam onto the operator's entire network. This should be reflected in the coverage information available to this roaming partner. Depending on the country, networks may be subdivided in this way by SID or even by NID. Some concern was raised over the potential administrative effort to authorize custom subsets of the operator's coverage for each roaming partner that is restricted in this way, but there doesn't seem to be an easy alternative.; A suggestion was made that operators should be able to see (at least at a high level) the coverage even of operators with whom they don't have a roaming agreement. This could then be used to select a potential roaming partner who could provide coverage in a desired area. Is this usage within the original scope of the coverage initiative, and will it complicate the legal/commercial sensitivities involved in releasing coverage info?

Appropriate use: How will the recipients of the coverage information use it? And how can that be enforced? E.g. information that was used to make a competitive claim against the provider of that coverage info would be bad. In what format will the information be provided to subscribers of the recipient operators?

End use: International travelers may not be intimately familiar with the geography of their destination country. What additional information (e.g. cities/towns, highways etc) should be available to the subscriber? Could this be provided by the service hoster, rather than the operator?

Data transfer: how will the information be shared? Email seems unwieldy and potentially insecure. Perhaps Secure-FTP to the server? How often would an update be required? Suggestions included every 3 or 6 months. Operators with no significant coverage change in this period should acknowledge that their previous coverage is still valid.

Coverage "bleeding": What to do about border areas where coverage may be available outside the area where the operator is licensed? Will operators undertake to provide "trimmed" maps that don't exceed their license area?

Carrier participation is key. All participants are encouraged to bring the Coverage Exchange Initiative to the attention of their roaming partners.
QC to request follow-up via the CRMs
Rather than derive requirements from scratch, it's much easier to criticize someone else's work! Carriers are encouraged to post their suggestions, comments and requirements to the wiki (here) for consideration by the group. Email submissions (to dsalek@qualcomm.com) can also be posted on your behalf.
The topic will be discussed at the face-to-face meeting June 22 in Miami. For those unable to attend in person, we will try to set up a voice conference. A combination of listening via phone and making comments via IM might be the most workable.