Roaming Revenue $80 Billion in 2017

Not all revenue earned in the global communications business, either fixed or mobile, comes from retail end users. Some portion of revenues comes from business partners, especially other service providers. In the global mobile business, roaming revenue paid by one carrier to another averages about eight percent of total revenue.

A new report from Juniper Research values mobile roaming revenues at more than $80 billion by 2017, compared to over $46 billion in 2012. Those revenues are driven by increasing data usage, but lower per-unit revenues.

Historically, roaming revenues have been earned by out of region mobile service providers who allow another network’s users access to the local network when those users are out of region. The new change is that customer access to out of region data networks, either mobile or Wi-Fi, is generating roaming revenue for the out of region suppliers.