Comfone welcomes TeliaSonera as the newest member of its WeRoam open roaming service

TeliaSonera, leading provider of telecommunications solutions in the Nordic and Baltic region, has joined WeRoam, Comfone’s award winning WiFi roaming service.

Bern, Switzerland, 17 September, 2009 – Comfone, provider of roaming services to more than 300 operators in over 130 countries, is proud to welcome TeliaSonera as the newest member of its WeRoam Wireless IP roaming platform with an aggregated footprint of over 60’000 hotspots all over the world. As one of the pioneering WiFi network operators in the Nordic region, TeliaSonera brings 3’400 hotspots to Comfone WeRoam’s network, thereby significantly increasing WeRoam’s reach in Scandinavia. Already connecting to nearly 60 WiFi networks worldwide, Comfone WeRoam is well positioned to support TeliaSonera as it extends its global WiFi coverage.

Comfone WeRoam is an advanced open roaming platform that supports username/password and EAP (SIM) certificates based authentication for WLAN Roaming. In the first half of 2009, WeRoam recorded a 43% annual increase in WLAN traffic as the market demand for broad WiFi coverage continues to grow. Despite the global economic downturn, fully 80% of Comfone WeRoam traffic in August 2009 was generated by travellers – 72% in hotels and 8% in airports. Combined with a further 12% generated in cafes and restaurants, wireless user trends clearly underscore the critical role that roaming plays for wireless operators.

TeliaSonera’s Head of Roaming, Jan Karmakar, commented, “Our customers are continuously increasing their use of mobile broadband and mobile data services both at home and while travelling. Therefore TeliaSonera requires reliable roaming partners like Comfone to substantially increase our access to more wireless hotspots allowing our customers to always be online.”

Laurent Freléchoux, Product Marketing Director WeRoam, further explained that with an average WeRoam session time of 47 minutes during the first half of the year, “We are noticing a constant increase in average session time, a clear indication that end users do find value in a WiFi roaming service. Compounded with the roll-out of Comfone’s Web Access Portal solution across the footprint, the outlook for traffic growth looks very positive.”

In the highly competitive roaming market, Comfone continues to provide innovative roaming solutions which optimise each operator's roaming processes and increase the efficiency of mobile roaming. Comfone’s latest technical contributions to facilitate WiMAX-to-WiFi roaming reflect its competence and power of innovation. The outstanding traffic growth on both its WeRoam and its other roaming hubs underscores Comfone’s leadership position in the wireless roaming market.

Comfone, provider of roaming services to over 300 operators in over 130 countries worldwide, is known throughout the telecoms industry as an international mobile roaming specialist. Comfone's industry know-how owes to over ten years of experience and customer-orientated in-house expertise.

Through its unique portfolio and additional value added services, Comfone fully optimises the setting up of each operator's roaming processes, facilitating the opportunity of reducing overall costs. The portfolio ranges from complete outsourcing of roaming to individual elements, such as signalling, data, convergence, clearing and WLAN services. Comfone's pioneering hub solutions, such as WeRoam, provide mobile operators with worldwide coverage, interconnection and clearing through only one agreement with Comfone and one connection to Comfone's central platform.

Comfone's active participation in GSMA Working groups, the WiMAX Forum and the Wireless Broadband Alliance ensures that its innovative solutions are market-driven. From Comfone's headquarters in Switzerland and regional offices covering Northern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, Central Asia and Asia Pacific, Comfone is well placed to support and meet the requirements of its substantial worldwide customer base. Learn more about Comfone at www.comfone.com.

Comfone AG
Cornelia Lanz
Head of Corporate Communications
Nussbaumstr 25
3000 Bern 22
Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 31 341 11 62
Fax: +41 (0) 31 341 10 11
Email: Cornelia.Lanz@comfone.com

This release was published on openPR.