Challenges and Opportunities for Global Cellular Connectivity

TL;DR

This paper surveys the global cellular ecosystem, highlighting the potential of Local Breakout (LBO) technology for seamless worldwide connectivity and discussing the challenges to its adoption.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the cellular ecosystem and advocates for LBO as a solution for global connectivity, addressing key barriers to its implementation.

Findings

LBO can enable direct internet routing for roaming users.

Adoption of LBO is hindered by policy, billing, and trust issues.

Technological advances could facilitate LBO deployment.

Abstract

Traditional cellular service was designed for global connectivity, but business and logistical constraints led to its fragmentation, with deployments limited to individual countries and regions. Initiatives like Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), Mobile Network Aggregators (MNAs), and regulations like ''roam-like-at-home'' have partially restored global service potential, though often at high costs in terms of user bills, application performance, and traffic efficiency. This paper makes two key contributions: first, it surveys the global cellular ecosystem, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of major players using data from prior research, proprietary datasets, and public sources. Second, it argues that the technology for seamless global service exists in Local Breakout (LBO), a roaming architecture which allows user traffic to be routed directly to the Internet through the visited network, bypassing the home network and/or third-party infrastructures. However, LBO adoption is hindered by issues such as policy enforcement, billing, and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, rooted in a lack of trust between operators. The paper concludes by exploring technological advances that could enable LBO, and pave the way for truly global cellular connectivity.