The TAP (Transferred Account Procedure) file format was designed for billing and settlement. Its commercial analytics potential is substantially broader. A TAP record contains service type, RAT indicator, duration, volume, and IOT-derived charge for every roaming session — a dataset that, when aggregated by the right dimensions, reveals the commercial structure of every bilateral roaming relationship an operator maintains. Most organisations are using a fraction of this signal.
What per-RAT analysis reveals
Aggregating inbound TAP records by RAT — 4G LTE versus 5G NR — and then by partner reveals which bilateral relationships have the highest NR traffic share and what the effective yield per megabyte is for each RAT on each partner relationship. When this is compared against the operator's cost to serve NR traffic, it identifies where the IOT is commercially misaligned.
In practice, this analysis frequently shows that 20–30% of inbound bilateral relationships account for the majority of NR-driven margin compression, while the remaining relationships are either NR-light or have IOTs that better reflect current costs. This concentration means that renegotiation effort can be focused precisely rather than applied uniformly across the entire partner portfolio.
Service-type yield decomposition
TAP records identify the service type associated with each charge — voice, SMS, data, and in some implementations service category subdivisions. Yield per service type, by partner, reveals which service combinations are most and least profitable under current IOT structures. In most portfolios, data yield dominates, but voice IOT anomalies — where legacy voice rates create unexpected margins or losses — can be significant in specific bilateral relationships, particularly those with telecom operators in regions where voice roaming remains a primary use case.
Service-type decomposition also supports the conversation about tiered IOT structures in renegotiations: presenting per-service yield data to a partner makes the case for service-specific rate adjustments more concretely than aggregate revenue figures.
Building the yield reporting capability
The primary technical requirement is a pipeline that parses TAP records, joins them to the current IOT schedule and the operator's cost ledger, and produces per-partner, per-RAT, per-service margin reports on a regular cadence. This is an achievable engineering task with existing data; the constraint is usually organisational — getting settlement data, IOT data, and cost data into the same analytical environment.
Operators that have built this capability report that the first full analysis almost always surfaces at least one bilateral relationship that is significantly more adverse than the commercial team believed, and at least one that is significantly more profitable. Both pieces of information are commercially useful: the first identifies renegotiation priorities; the second identifies relationships worth investing in and protecting.
