­Roaming services providers, Mach and Accuris Networks have announced the world’s first ever pre-paid inter-standard roaming call was made while roaming on to a GSM network by a CDMA customer. The call was made possible by Mach’s Inter-Standard Roaming (ISR) platform, which uses Accuris Networks’ AccuROAM inter-working platform, and as the result of an agreement signed with Starcomms Nigeria to deploy Mach’s ISR solutions which is a first in Africa.

“More than 90% of mobile subscriptions in the CDMA world today are pre-paid and typically these subscribers cannot and do not normally roam,” said Guy Dubois, President and CEO of Mach. “By successfully demonstrating the first pre-paid roaming call across two wholly disparate technologies, CDMA and GSM, using Mach’s ISR solution, we have taken the first step towards opening up this vast untapped market for mobile operators. This achievement is a first in the industry and firmly positions Mach as a leader in the ISR pre-paid roaming market.” 

The agreement between Mach and Starcomms Nigeria will provide Starcomms’ prepaid CDMA customers with access to international mobile roaming on GSM networks. 

Dubois added: “Until now, CDMA operators have been faced with a stark choice. Either they made the large capital investments in ‘Box in a network’ solutions and committed the high operational expenditure necessary to open up inter-standard access for their customers, or they lost revenue to local providers of GSM services,”