Roaming operations are a critical function within telecom operators, enabling subscribers to use their mobile services seamlessly when travelling outside their home network. These operations rely on complex partnerships between mobile network operators (MNOs) and hubs worldwide, governed by roaming agreements and supported by regularly updated technical and commercial data—most notably the IR.21 roaming partner and IR.85 hubbing exchange documents accessed through the GSMA member portal.
Managing roaming requires coordination across multiple domains: contract management, technical integration, billing, and ongoing service assurance. Operators must track changes in partner networks, such as updates to network elements, IP ranges, global titles, or supported technologies and ensure these changes are reflected accurately in their own systems to avoid service disruption.
Challenges arise due to the volume and frequency of updates, the variety of data formats, and the number of departments involved across commercial, engineering, testing, and operations teams. Manual processes are often used to ingest documents, validate changes, update systems, and notify stakeholders, making the process time-consuming and error-prone. Delays or mistakes can result in failed connections, billing disputes, or degraded customer experience. Moreover, ensuring compliance with each partner’s technical requirements and maintaining accurate, up-to-date configurations across hundreds of partners is a continuous challenge that puts significant pressure on roaming teams.
The customer aimed to transform their roaming operations by automating the end-to-end process of handling IR.21 updates from partners and IR.85 updates from hubs. Their primary objectives were to eliminate manual validation and configuration tasks, reduce operational risk, and ensure faster, more accurate propagation of partner network changes into their own infrastructure. By improving data accuracy, compliance, and coordination across departments, the customer sought to significantly cut validation and implementation times while maintaining full control and governance over every network change.
We Are CORTEX delivered a fully automated, end-to-end process for handling roaming partner and hubbing updates. From detecting partner changes in complex RAEX documents, to assessing the home network impact and finally safely deploying network configuration updates across the home network element (across signalling, IP, core and IMS).
The customer’s process was broken down into 3 stages, each of which were automated independently.
CORTEX securely connects to the GSMA Roaming Gateway to ingest subscribed IR.21 and IR.85 updates. Partner and hubbing documents are parsed into structured JSON, enriched with metadata, and validated for format, ranges, and dependencies. The system automatically compares the latest data with previous versions, classifying changes into additions, removals, or modifications, and generates detailed change reports and logs for compliance and auditing.
Read More about our Detect Use Case
We help the world’s leading CSPs intelligently automate their networks.
Graeme Hughes
Managing Director
We Are CORTEX
CORTEX determines how partner and hub updates affect the operator’s own infrastructure. The system interrogates inventory and CMDBs to identify impacted devices, verifies current configurations, and defines the required target state for each node. It then establishes dependency workflows, outlines rollback paths, and creates structured Change Orders in ticketing systems for network engineering teams, ensuring every planned change is both traceable and reversible.
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CORTEX executes validated updates directly on multi-vendor devices. The system performs pre-change checks, generates device commands, and submits them for approval. On approval, commands are executed automatically, with rollback safeguards triggered if issues arise. Post-change validation ensures devices and services are restored to the desired state, with scheduled stability checks confirming longer-term health. All actions are logged, and Trouble Tickets are automatically updated for full operational transparency.
By unifying this complex end-to-end process, CORTEX enabled this operator to eliminate almost all the manual effort. This reduced errors significantly, whilst simultaneously accelerating the time-to-implement the roaming changes within the network. This operator now ensures roaming updates are implemented accurately, consistently, and with complete governance, strengthening service quality and compliance across the roaming ecosystem.
Read More about our Deploy Use Case
The Operator significantly reduced risk and accelerated implementation by shifting from manual execution to fully automated network capability. As the operator works towards TM Forum evaluations and approvals, for Level 4 they would need to introduce AI. This best serves them from a Service Assurance lens, ensuring all of the fully autonomous aspects of the evolved Roaming strategy continues to deliver.
Ultimately, this Customer is able to shift focus from manual effort, in a capacity-constrained operation, to unlocking more Partners and new Services. This contributes to a wider commercial strategy to develop net new revenue, and to better utilise the network. Better utilisation allows for smarter steering incentives and helps Operators achieve improved margins. By eliminating and reducing manual effort, Engineering talent is directed towards strategic objectives, innovation and intelligent application of their talent.
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