Security in roaming is an all-or-nothing scenario!

The world is upside down technically, commercially, and politically. Customer requirements evolve continuously, services are required to be contextual and open while telecommunication solutions are increasingly becoming critical infrastructure.

Regulation is getting involved while the industry and technology moves faster and faster toward an open world where everything is connected to everything, where services are created and decommissioned on the fly based on customer demands.

But regardless of the speed of new service offerings, the privacy of our customers stays crucial, and their security is mandatory.

Newly introduced technologies like 5G standalone (SA) totally embrace this evolving world. 5G SA is designed to be open. Each network element talks via APIs, and services can use these capabilities to be closer to customers. 5G SA is the technology where B2B and B2C becomes by design B2D2X (Business to Developer to X). However, this openness creates security risks that must be properly vetted.

This is why 5G SA is the first core network explicitly designed to be secure. There is extreme security at the radio access level, in the core and, explicitly, in roaming. Roaming in 5G SA is for the first time secure by design (if properly managed). The industry has now the chance to guarantee no-man-in-the-middle model in roaming. We should not miss this opportunity, simply because we are used to past ways of doing business.

But protecting the next-generation technology is not enough if the previous protocols are being neglected. It’s like building a gate without a fence or buying a safe and leaving it open.

Security must be all in! With the peace of mind that the no-man-in-the-middle principle of 5G SA gives us, the industry must rethink past ways of working. We need to reconsider how we do roaming now and start protecting our customers today rather than at some indetermined point in the future.? The technologies are there and allow us to do so, it is up to us to use them and plan them properly.

Market research firm Kaleido Intelligence recently conducted a study in which it found that losses from fraud and security incidents look set to peak at $45 billion globally in 2025 before declining to $36 billion in 2028 as new 5G security measures become more widely used. This is only one indicator that security in roaming is a commercial decision that needs to be taken now. We at T Wholesale hope that our industry will rise to the challenge and keep our operator customers and their subscribers secure when they roam.