Roaming in EV charging is the ability to charge on a network you have no direct account with, using your existing provider — the charging equivalent of using your mobile phone abroad. It relies on agreements between charge point operators (CPOs) and e-mobility service providers (eMSPs), often brokered through roaming hubs.
Protocols such as OCPI make roaming technically possible by standardizing how location, tariff and session data flow between parties. Without a shared representation of what a station is and what it costs, cross-network billing and discovery break down.
Roaming is why consistent, cross-network data matters so much: a roaming product is only as good as its ability to present every reachable network in one coherent, comparable form — the same core problem that normalization solves.
In the Data for EV model
Because Data for EV normalizes 65 networks onto one canonical model and projects to OCPI 2.3.0, it gives roaming and aggregation products a single, comparable view of every network instead of a pile of incompatible feeds.