Globe Telecom uses Blockchain to focus on roaming

This is an excerpt from the TM Forum report - Blockchain: Where’s the value for telecoms? Download the report now for the full insight.

Globe Telecom operates one of the largest mobile, fixed-line and broadband networks in the Philippines. The company has already demonstrated considerable interest in blockchain technology, with a particular focus on solutions intended to address the settlement of roaming costs. This, Globe believes, could lead to settlements being conducted in real time, without needing offline reconciliation.

At the time our report was published, Vincent Seet, Head of Enterprise Architecture, Globe Telecom explained “We’re still at the POC stage, but we envisage blockchain will remove the need for a data clearinghouse. All partners engaged in roaming transactions will maintain a blockchain record, so they will know how and when the roaming occurred.”

In addition, Globe’s subsidiary, Globe Fintech Innovations (also known as Mynt), and Alibaba Group’s Ant Financial used blockchain as the basis for the world’s first cross-border digital wallet-based money transfer service in June 2018. Globe Telecom is keen to promote blockchain technology across the sector and was one of several CSPs championing TM Forum’s Blockchain Unleashed Catalyst (see below).

Catalyst shows potential of blockchain

TM Forum’s Blockchain Unleashed Catalyst aimed to show just how disruptive blockchain might be for CSPs.

BT, Globe Telecom, KDDI, Optus, Orange, Singtel, Telefónica, Ultrafast Fiber and Vodafone all collaborated on the project, with other participants including Deloitte, IBM, Infosys and Openet. Globe Telecom managed the Catalyst, which focused on five use cases:

• Eliminating CDRs to enable real time fraud detection, dispute-free settlement and billing
• Digital identity-as-a service
• Service-level agreement monitoring
• Reducing mobile phone thefts
• Mobile number portability

The next phase of the project was demonstrated at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World 2019 in Nice, France, last May. The award-winning demonstration showed how TM Forum assets could be used by communication service providers (CSPs) to implement blockchains. These assets included the Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) and Open APIs as well as ecosystem modelling tool CurateFX.

Tayeb Ben Meriem, OAM Senior Standards Specialist at Orange – which is a champion in the Catalyst alongside Vodafone – explained that the motivation for the second phase of the work was to find out how blockchain could help communications service providers (CSPs) move towards a new, more flexible and on-demand way of sourcing and procuring telecom infrastructure and assets that doesn’t involve capital expenditure (CapEx).

Catalyst champions outline a business challenge and work with participants – in this case, Infosys, IOTA, Nokia and r3 — to solve it. The Catalyst also has a collaboration with Stanford University in relation to smart contracts.

Ben Meriem explained that the Catalyst is focusing on two use cases of “high interest” to CSPs: reinforcing existing infrastructure or acquiring it for a temporary event, such as in a stadium and opening up business opportunities in a country where it has no or incomplete infrastructure in place.

“And to do both of these, I don’t want to invest CapEx,” said Ben Meriem.