Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a typical market area, wireless service providers may operate radio access networks (RANs) each arranged to provide mobile terminals with wireless communication service. Each such a RAN may include a number of base stations that radiate to define wireless coverage areas in which to serve mobile terminals according to a radio access technology such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA (e.g., Long Term Evolution (LTE) or Wireless Operability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) (e.g., 1×RTT and 1×EV-DO), GSM, GPRS, UMTS, EDGE, iDEN, TDMA, AMPS, MMDS, WIFI, and BLUETOOTH, or others now known or later developed. In turn, each base station may be coupled with network infrastructure that provides connectivity with one or more transport networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and/or the Internet for instance. With this arrangement, a mobile terminal within coverage of the RAN may engage in air interface communication with a base station and may thereby communicate via the base station with various remote network entities or with other mobile terminals served by the base station or by other base stations.
A wireless service provider may operate one or more such RANs as a public land mobile network (PLMN) for serving mobile terminals. For example, a service provider may operate a CDMA RAN as a PLMN for serving mobile terminals with CDMA service, and/or the service provider may operate an LTE RAN as a PLMN for serving mobile terminals with LTE service. In general, each such PLMN may have a respective PLMN identifier (PLMNid), and mobile terminals may subscribe to service of the PLMN be provisioned with data indicating that PLMNid.
In addition to operating a RAN as its own PLMN, a wireless service provider may also operate a RAN on behalf of one or more other wireless service providers known as “mobile virtual network operators” (MVNOs), to allow the MVNOs to provide wireless communication service without the need to build out RANs of their own. (In practice, an MVNO may be a different company than the actual RAN operator or may be the same company as the actual RAN operator.) In this arrangement, the MVNO may be considered to provide an MVNO PLMN, which may have its own PLMNid. However, the wireless service provider would in fact be operating its RAN not only as its own PLMN but also as the MVNO's PLMN. In addition, a wireless service provider that functions as an MVNO using the RAN of another service provider may also operate its own RAN in certain locations, and may in fact host service for the other service provider in certain locations, such that the other service provider would then function as an MVNO in those locations.
Still further, a wireless service provider may have roaming agreements with other wireless service providers, to provide a wider range of coverage for mobile terminals. In such arrangements, a mobile terminal that subscribes to service of a service provider's PLMN but is not within sufficient coverage of that PLMN may instead be served by another service provider's PLMN, and the service providers may work with each other to account for the costs of that roaming service.
In practice, base stations of a given RAN may therefore provide service for possibly multiple PLMNs. For instance, a base station operated by a wireless service provider may provide service for a PLMN of that service provider and may also provide service for a PLMN of an MVNO, and perhaps for a PLMNs of various roaming partners.