As part of our wholesale business we offer network interconnection, international and national roaming, services for MVNO’s, shared access to network assets, lease of network infrastructure, as well as other telecommunication and non-telecommunication services provided to other telecommunication companies in Poland and abroad.
As of December 31, 2016, Polkomtel was a party to 26 interconnection agreements with national and international operators.
Such a number of interconnection relations allows for optimizing the costs of call termination in the networks of other operators, while maintaining the highest quality of telecommunication services for our end-users with respect to the traffic, both initiated and terminated in our network.
Effective April 2016, Polkomtel started charging – under the interconnect settlements with domestic and foreign operators - higher MTRs for calls terminated in the mobile network of Polkomtel which were initiated outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Introduction of such a settlement model for the traffic terminated in the mobile network of Polkomtel is aimed at building a counterweight to unilateral actions undertaken by foreign operators from outside the EEA, consisting in applying increasingly growing MTRs for the incoming traffic from t Polish networks, which resulted in a higher cost of outbound calls from Polkomtel’s network to these countries as well as the higher cost of the calls answered by Polkomtel’s customers using roamingu services in the networks from outside the EEA. Introduction of a higher MTR’s for mobile termination, in Polkomtel’s network, of the calls initiated outside the EEA led to improvement of the financial balance of our settlements with foreign operators.
As part of our wholesale business we provide roaming services to mobile operators that allow the subscribers of foreign mobile telecommunication networks to use telecommunication services (including voice calls, text messaging and data transmission) when logged to Polkomtel's mobile network, i.e. outside their home network. We also enter into international roaming wholesale agreements in order to provide, both to our own customers and the subscribers of MVNOs, international roaming services in the networks of our roaming partners..
As of December 31, 2016, Polkomtel network offered international roaming services for voice calls in 550 networks in 212 countries and territories. In addition, our international roaming service offers roaming data transmission packages in 452 networks in 175 countries and territories. Access to LTE technology is possible in 81 networks in 56 countries and territories, while access to 3G is offered in 364 networks in 147 countries and territories.
As a part of the wholesale national roaming service, we offer voice calls, text messaging and packet data transmission services (including MMS) to P4. P4's subscribers have been using Polkomtel's mobile telecommunications network since the beginning of P4’s operations in 2007.
As part of our cooperation with MVNOs, we provide wholesale services including voice calls, text messaging and packet data transmission (including MMS), premium rate services, value-added services, international roaming services, services provided to authorized entities, hosting services on Polkomtel’s billing platform, customer support, servicing the MVNO’s subscribers’ complaints, access to SIM card and mobile phone procurement channels and to Polkomtel’s top-up channels as well as other services, depending on the needs and selected model of technical cooperation with an MVNO.
In connection with a very dynamic development of the mobile data transmission services in Poland, Polkomtel has added a simple wholesale model to its offer, allowing for starting the MVNO operations also by small partners for whom the time and cost of implementation is of key importance. A trend of selling services in bundled packages, which is clearly visible on the market, makes mobile services a very important addition to the fixed-line services provided by the partners. The observed changes lead to the significant increase in launching of MVNO operations by telecommunication operators. In 2017 we intend to continue developing our wholesale activities by seeking new domestic and international partners, as well as by expanding our cooperation with the existing wholesale partners. Polkomtel’s assistance in fulfilment of the statutory obligation of registration of prepaid cards is an important element of the cooperation with MVNO’s.