07 October 2025

Darren Shaw, Chief Product Officer, eSIM Go

Today, North African MNOs are keeping less than 10-20% of the value of travel eSIM data consumed on their own networks by inbound roamers. The rest flows straight to international eSIM vendors.

Travellers are connecting, operators are carrying the traffic — but the revenue is leaving the country. Outbound subscribers are doing the same when they travel, abandoning high-margin roaming domestic bundles for global eSIM brands. Operators are being disintermediated in both directions.

This is not ‘cannibalisation of roaming.’ It’s disintermediation — and it’s happening now.

The travel eSIM surge

Independent forecasts confirm what operators already see in their traffic stats:

• Juniper Research: global travel eSIM users to grow 440% in the next five years.
• Kaleido Intelligence: retail spend on travel eSIMs will hit $10 billion by 2028, up from $3.3bn in 2025.

Inbound roamers want to buy instantly, digitally, at the point of booking. Outbound travellers want affordable, flexible data abroad without worrying about how much data they use or the administration of adding and cancelling bolt-on packages. And global marketplaces are meeting that need.

For decades, roaming was a high-margin, high-control revenue stream. But those margins were sustained by reciprocal wholesale agreements. With travel eSIM, that protection is gone.

Defend too hard with premium wholesale rates, and traffic flows to a competitor MNO. Do nothing, and digital eSIM vendors take it all. Meanwhile, operators continue to carry traffic, invest in infrastructure, and provide QoS — all for a fraction of the value.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about ‘silent roamers’ anymore. That was 1995. This is about a structural shift where 90% of the value is leaking away.

The operator advantage

Here’s the good news: operators still hold the most important cards — the network, the brand, the billing relationship, and trust. What’s missing is the ability to activate travel eSIMs at scale, with global coverage, at the right price points.

We work with MNOs across the Middle East and Africa who have launched branded and co-branded travel eSIMs, capturing inbound roamers directly and ensuring traffic stays on the operator’s network; monetised international eSIM inbound traffic for MNOs by partnering with hundreds of global vendors, OTAs and airlines; retained outbound roamers with affordable, branded solutions — sometimes even winning customers roaming traffic away from rival MNOs; and achieved up to 4x increase in roaming traffic, ARPU and revenue growth within 18 months.

If MNOs defend too hard and maintain premium or traditional inbound roaming wholesale rates, competitors simply take the traffic. Push too hard on wholesale, and rates collapse in a race to the bottom — fuelled by international eSIM vendors moving petabytes of traffic at ultra-thin margins, free from the traditional bilateral agreements that once protected fair value to both MNOs.

And let’s be clear: not all travel eSIMs are created equal. Many global providers throttle data without disclosing it within their Terms and Conditions, route traffic through opaque jurisdictions that raise privacy concerns, and run on less resilient infrastructure with poor service and support. Most are marketplaces, not networks.

For operators, that creates real risk. Your brand has been built on trust and reliability. Do you really want it tied to cut-price services that frustrate customers and fail to meet expectations? A bad experience abroad reflects on you, not the marketplace. The reputational cost far outweighs any short-term wholesale gain.
The travel eSIM revolution isn’t ‘on the horizon.’ It’s here. And the question for North African MNOs is simple: will you keep handing 90% of the value to global vendors, or will you take it back?