Roaming revenues aren’t cooling down anytime soon.
International travel is rebounding, travelers expect to stay connected, and operators are sitting on a growing opportunity. Kaleido Intelligence estimates wholesale and retail roaming revenues to surpass $70 billion in 2030.
At the same time, eSIM is reshaping how travelers access connectivity abroad. A new survey from Mobile World Live found roaming as the second most cited use case for consumer eSIM (55%). But despite this clear demand, only 12% of operators have built a profitable roaming eSIM business, and 45% aren't even active in the space.
The market wants roaming, so what is stopping operators from turning eSIM adoption into roaming revenue? And how can they capitalize on the opportunity?
Execution is where most operators get stuck with an eSIM roaming rollout.
The survey revealed these roadblocks:
45% cite partner coordination
41% flag technical integration
26% point to upgrading backend processes
Over on the consumer side, 35% point to a complicated activation process as a barrier to adoption.
These technical challenges can make it more tempting to stick with the status quo of a “good enough” roaming offer. But with the rise of dedicated travel eSIM businesses that offer instant activation, flexibility, and attractive pricing, operators risk giving up their competitive advantage to companies that don’t have a network advantage.
Fortunately, there’s a solution to these technical challenges, but it requires a switch-up in how roaming is framed.
“Connectivity alone has become a commoditized product. To remain relevant, operators need to own that connectivity experience.”
Ryan Weikert, WMS speaking at The Travel eSIM Webinar Series 2026
Traditional roaming is essentially passive: it exists because customers travel. The experience is by default, the pricing inherits legacy rates, the offers are rigid.
It’s a service that’s being provided.
But what if operators started thinking of roaming as a product?
This might feel like a philosophical difference, but it impacts every decision downstream: how provisioning works, how pricing is set, and how you know what's performing.
A product you’ve designed doesn’t have a complicated activation process. It has one you chose, tested, and can iterate.
A product you’ve designed can let you see your performance in real time, rather than relying on what worked last month.
A product you’ve designed will integrate with your business, not the other way around.
23% of mobile industry leaders already see eSIM as enabling new digital revenue streams (Source: the Mobile World Live survey). These operators have started packaging eSIM as a product that customers deliberately choose and pay for. The same 45% who aren't yet active in eSIM roaming are still running the older model: roaming as infrastructure, revenue as a byproduct.
Both groups have access to the same market. The difference is what they've decided roaming is for.
Operators approaching roaming as a designed product have three realistic paths, each with different trade-offs on speed, control, and cost.
Full ownership of the product, pricing logic, provisioning stack, and data. For operators with the technical resources and appetite, it's the highest-control option, but it’s also the slowest. Building out bilateral agreements, integrating provisioning infrastructure, and getting to a scalable activation experience takes years and significant capital before a single customer uses it.
Faster to market than a full in-house build, and the coverage question is largely solved. The trade-off is visibility. Aggregator models often sit between the operator and the underlying network data, which limits how much margin and performance insight actually reaches the operator. The product gets launched; control over how it performs is harder to maintain.
The fastest route to a designed product with operator-level control intact. A good platform handles the partner network coverage, the provisioning infrastructure, and the activation flow, without abstracting away the performance data operators need to manage margin. The operator stays in the product, without having to build the infrastructure underneath it.
Most operators who've built profitable roaming eSIM businesses didn't build everything from scratch. They picked the model that got them to market fastest while keeping the levers they needed.
Two key barriers highlighted by the survey, partner coordination and activation complexity, are exactly what Telna’s platform is built to remove.
Traditional roaming infrastructure depends on partner coordination, but it’s also the biggest obstacle between an operator’s ambition and their time to market. Telna gives you access, with a single integration, to 350+ direct roaming agreements, 35+ MNO IMSI partnerships, and redundant access to 800+ networks in 190+ countries.
Activation complexity is where roaming products tend to lose customers before they've even started. Telna handles digital eSIM provisioning with real-time profile management and instant activation, so the activation experience is something operators can own and optimize.
"We relaunched travel eSIM with MNOs, with great success," noted Gregory Gundelfinger, CEO of Telna, at The Travel eSIM Webinar 2026. "The consumer is demanding travel eSIM. Providing it through existing trusted channels, rather than separate apps, is what makes the difference."
Beyond launch, the platform gives operators live visibility into usage, performance, and margin data across regions. That's what turns roaming from a settlement line into something you can actually manage: a revenue stream with the same operational transparency as any other product in the portfolio.
The 12% who've built profitable roaming eSIM businesses made a decision the other 88% haven't yet. The market is still open, and the gap just closes a little more each quarter. Ready to be one of the operators who got there first? Talk to Telna.
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