By Jeanne Lim
Wednesday, June 21 2006 11:51 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/communicasia/2006/0,39057962,39369380,00.htm

COMMUNICASIA, SINGAPORE--VeriSign is wooing telecoms operators keen to improve their mobile roaming services by ramping up its communications network in Asia.

The Silicon Valley company, better known as the organization which manages the dot-com and dot-net directories in the Internet world, announced Wednesday that it has built network signaling transport points and signaling control points in the Japanese cities of Osaka and Tokyo.

VeriSign owns the largest Signaling System 7 (SS7) network for Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), or traditional phone networks. SS7 is a telecommunications protocol designed to offload PSTN data traffic congestion onto a wireless or wireline digital broadband network.

The US$1.2 billion-company also said that Korea's SK Telecom will be the first CDMA (code division multiple access) operator in Asia to use its new network services in a multi-year, multimillion dollar deal.

Sixty percent of VeriSign's revenue comes from its communications business.

According to Mark Hopper, vice president of international solutions and market development at VeriSign, operators using local network capabilities can increase performance and availability for intra-Asia voice and data roaming traffic. Previously, much of that traffic has to be routed back to the United States even it is between Asian operators, he noted.

Prior to building the new network infrastructure, "if a Korean subscriber went to a meeting in Beijing, and called home, his call will 'trombone' to the U.S. first before going to Korea,", Hopper said, during an interview with ZDNet Asia.

This exposes roaming calls to less reliability and poorer performance, he explained. By using a network signaling infrastructure in Asia, "all those [roaming] services don't have to trombone back to the U.S. first", he said.

Priding itself on its "five-nines" reliability pedigree--VeriSign's uptime performance of running dot-net and dot-net is 100 percent--the company is guaranteeing the same reliability for operator customers, said Hopper.

Besides delivering more reliability to their roaming subscribers, he added that operators can also look forward to more revenue if they signed up with Verisign, as they do not have to spend millions on equipment purchase. "Our business model is transaction based," he said.

Asia calling
Meanwhile, VeriSign is set to expand its presence in Asia this year with new offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, said Marshall Towe, Asia-Pacific vice president of VeriSign communications services business. He also revealed that within the next quarter, the company will be carrying out a "major expansion in China".

Towe said: "We're talking with two of the largest carriers in China."

Besides SK Telecom, VeriSign counts SingTel as its other key customer in the region. Last September, the vendor inked a deal with the Singapore carrier to use its GSM transport services to provide next-generation roaming for SingTel Opus callers outside of Australia.