National Roaming for Resilience

Mobile communications are an integral part of everyday life. In less than 30 years they have surpassed the traditional fixed line telephony. Every day millions of European citizens rely on mobile telephony for work, social life, but also to contact emergency services. Hence outages of a mobile network can have a severe impact on the economy and on society. Mobile network outages are common. In 2012, EU Member States reported 79 significant incidents of electronic communications to ENISA and the European Commission. Most of these incidents had an impact on mobile telephony and mobile Internet. The goal of this report is to help National Regulatory Authority (NRAs) understand if and how roaming at national level could be used to improve resilience of mobile communication networks and services in case of large outages and start the discussion with the market players around this topic.