TeliaSonera signed a cooperation agreement with France Telecom-Orange and Deutsche Telekom to work together on M2M communication services. The French and German operators agreed to work together in February, initially covering France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. They have since added the Netherlands and the UK, and the global footprint will be extended further with TeliaSonera to include Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania. Customers will benefit from operability across borders and enhanced M2M service quality on the mobile networks of the three operators. While roaming agreements have been managed bi-laterally only, concentrated within single markets, this multi-lateral cooperation agreement will provide roaming services with enhanced service quality across the countries. The carriers said the partnership was open for other operators to join as well.
A key feature of the agreement is the incident and troubleshooting capability that France Telecom-Orange, Deutsche Telekom and TeliaSonera will be improving to ensure the best quality of roaming services to their customers. Because machine-to-machine communication is business critical for M2M customers, all M2M roaming services will have a dedicated support component. Enhanced M2M interoperability will also be maintained as the three partners conduct joint testing to harmonize module standards. Module certification will enable the most optimized interoperability between module and network. This will lead to a stable module performance in all countries covered by the three groups, enabling a quicker and more optimized integration of the modules in M2M customers’ devices and machines.
