Enterprise roaming is becoming one of the most interesting extensions of the travel eSIM market. Not because companies have suddenly discovered cheaper mobile data, but because eSIM is exposing how poorly international connectivity has traditionally been managed inside many organizations.

Consumer traveI eSIMs changed expectations first. Travellers became accustomed to installing a digital profile, avoiding operator roaming charges and connecting shortly after landing. That experience is now influencing the corporate market, where the underlying problem is considerably more complicated.

An individual traveller can choose a plan, install an eSIM and move on. A company may have hundreds or thousands of employees travelling across different countries, using different devices, submitting different expenses and relying on connectivity for VPN access, cloud platforms, authentication codes and client calls. Finance sees the cost after the trip. IT often has limited visibility. Procurement negotiates roaming agreements without necessarily knowing how employees actually connect once they leave the country.

This is why the enterprise eSIM conversation is moving beyond the question of who sells the cheapest gigabyte. The emerging category is about centralized deployment, policy control, predictable billing, network reliability and removing connectivity decisions from the employee altogether. A growing number of travel eSIM providers and connectivity platforms are developing business-focused management tools, turning enterprise travel connectivity into a genuinely competitive market rather than a niche add-on.

Half is entering that market with a particularly focused proposition. Instead of asking employees or administrators to purchase a new package for every journey, it provides one permanent eSIM per employee, automatic activation when the traveller arrives and pricing based on travel days rather than gigabytes. The company says its service covers more than 200 destinations and gives finance, IT and fleet managers real-time oversight of usage and cost.

The distinction matters. Half is not simply trying to make a consumer travel eSIM easier to distribute to a team. Its bet is that enterprise buyers will place greater value on predictability, governance and operational simplicity than on finding the lowest possible price per gigabyte.

Alertify spoke with Augustin de Wailly, co-founder of Half, about what remains broken in corporate roaming, why connectivity is becoming part of the enterprise mobility stack and whether business travellers could drive the next important phase of the eSIM market.

Q1. Half is entering the market at a moment when travel eSIM is already crowded on the consumer side. Why did you decide that enterprise roaming was the more interesting problem to solve?

The consumer market is crowded because the problem is relatively simple: you need data abroad, you buy a cheap plan. It works, and dozens of apps do it.

The enterprise problem had not been seriously addressed. It had just been tolerated.

Enterprise is a different problem entirely. When we started talking to companies, the frustration was not about price per gigabyte; it was about control. Finance had no way to forecast roaming spend. IT had no idea which and where employees were roaming or on which networks. Employees were either buying local SIMs out of pocket and expensing them, or they were using their corporate SIM with a roaming pack that nobody really understood. The more we dug in, the more we realised the enterprise problem had not been seriously addressed. It had just been tolerated. That is a much more interesting space to build in, as we truly believe that employees should connect abroad the same way they connect when they are in their offices: without even thinking about it.

Q2. Many companies already have roaming agreements with mobile operators. What is still broken in that model from your point of view?

Operator agreements were built for a world that no longer exists.
They assume a stable headcount, predictable travel, and procurement cycles measured in years. Today, employees are hired across borders, trips are booked in 48 hours, and the roaming bill arrives before anyone knew the trip was happening.
But the real problem isn’t the price. It’s what you get for it. An operator agreement gives you a rate. Not visibility. You don’t know who’s connected, where, for how long, or whether the plan they activated matched what they actually needed. You get a bill. Once a month. After the fact. That’s not managing connectivity. That’s discovering what happened.

Q3. Half talks about paying per day rather than per gigabyte. Why do you think the enterprise buyer is ready for that shift?

Nobody budgets a business trip in gigabytes.
A trip to New York is three days, and a conference in Singapore is four. Every cost attached to that trip (flights, hotels, per diems)  is measured in days. Roaming never was. That’s the problem.
Per-day pricing doesn’t require enterprise buyers to change how they think. It maps to how they already think. Finance looks at a calendar, not a data counter. A three-day trip has a fixed connectivity cost. It’s a line item they can plan, not a variable they discover on the invoice.
It also changes how employees behave. Per-gigabyte pricing creates anxiety: people ration data, avoid video calls, disconnect from the tools they need to do their job. A day rate removes that entirely. Use what you need. The cost is already known.
The enterprise buyer isn’t being asked to adopt a new model. They’re being given the one that should have existed from the start.

Q4. In consumer travel eSIM, price per GB became the easiest comparison point. In enterprise, is that the wrong metric?

Per-GB pricing made sense for one use case: an individual trying to stretch a prepaid plan on holiday. That’s not the enterprise problem.
In a corporate context, nobody is optimising for the cheapest gigabyte. They’re optimising for predictability, reliability, and zero operational overhead. When an employee misses a client call because they ran out of data, that costs more than whatever you saved on the rate. When finance receives an invoice three months later with line items nobody can explain, someone spends a day investigating it. That cost never appears in the per-GB comparison.

Half prices per day because that’s what enterprise buyers actually need to manage: time, not data

The real metric for enterprise is total cost of ownership, which includes the time spent managing, explaining, and reconciling roaming. Per-GB pricing hides that cost. It makes the unit look cheap while the overhead stays invisible.
Half prices per day because that’s what enterprise buyers actually need to manage: time, not data.

Q5. Your model seems built around predictability: fixed packages, no overage surprises, and controlled eligibility. Is Half mainly a cost-saving product, or is it really a control product?

Half is both. And that combination is what makes it new.
Control came first. When a company can see in real time who has an active eSIM, who is roaming today, what it costs, and set eligibility rules by role, by destination, by policy, they can make decisions they simply couldn’t make before. That governance layer doesn’t exist anywhere in the current market. Not with operators, not with consumer eSIM apps repurposed for business. But control leads directly to savings. Unused plans stop being purchased. Redundant expenses disappear. The administrative overhead of reconciling bills that nobody owns goes to zero.
The result: companies switching to Half reduce their roaming spend by up to 70%.
Not by buying cheaper gigabytes. By eliminating the waste that came with having no visibility in the first place.
For the first time, enterprise roaming is predictable: in cost, in usage, in governance. That’s what makes Half the best data roaming solution built for enterprise.

Q6. The permanent reusable eSIM is an interesting part of your positioning. Why does “install once, reuse for every trip” matter so much in a corporate environment?

Friction at the point of travel kills adoption. Every time.
If an employee has to scan a QR code, download a new eSIM, navigate carrier settings, and troubleshoot connectivity on the morning of a flight, most won’t. They’ll use their personal phone, expense a random data plan, or rely on hotel Wi-Fi and hope the client call holds. That’s not a user experience problem. It’s a structural one.
At the office, nobody thinks about connectivity. It’s just there. Half’s belief is simple: traveling employees deserve exactly the same experience.

Friction at the point of travel kills adoption. Every time.

So we removed that moment of friction entirely. IT deploys the eSIM once: via MDM or a simple link. The employee installs it once, in under two minutes. From that point on, every trip is automatic: land, connect, done. No QR code, no activation, no support ticket. The company is billed only for the days actually used.
One install. Every trip. Forever.
Connected at the office. Connected on the road. Without ever thinking about it.

Q7. Who is the real buyer for Half inside a company: finance, procurement, IT, HR, travel managers, or the employee experience team?

It depends on how the pain first surfaces, but the deal almost always involves at least two of those stakeholders. Finance is usually the one who notices the problem first, because they are the ones receiving the invoices. IT gets pulled in because deployment involves device management. Fleet managers care about policy consistency. What we find in practice is that the champion is often whoever was most embarrassed by the last roaming bill, or whoever spent the most time trying to answer the question of what roaming actually cost the company last quarter. Once we can give them a live dashboard with that answer, they become advocates internally.
The ICP is the fleet manager and the key sponsors are IT and Procurement.

Q8. Business travelers often care less about the cheapest data and more about whether it works when they land. How do you think about network quality, support, and reliability compared with consumer eSIM providers?

Business travelers don’t want the cheapest data. They want data that works when they land. But Half goes further than that, and this is where it gets counterintuitive.
With every other solution, employees have to purchase or provision a data plan before they travel. Choose a package, activate it, hope they got the size right. Half works the opposite way: no purchase, no provisioning, nothing to do before the trip. The moment an employee lands, Half automatically activates a 24-hour unlimited plan on the best available local network. They didn’t do anything. It just works.
And the networks we connect through are not budget MVNOs optimised for cost. Half connects to premium local carriers in each country — the ones that actually handle 4G and 5G video calls, VPN access, and cloud tools without dropping. Landing in Tokyo or Riyadh, the connection works the way it does at the office.
On support: our philosophy is that employees should never need it. If the eSIM is deployed correctly and network selection is automatic, there is nothing to troubleshoot. But when something does go wrong, there is a company behind them, not a chatbot and a FAQ page.
The bar for consumer eSIM is “good enough for a tourist.” The bar for Half is “indistinguishable from being at the office.”

Q9. Many travel eSIMs still rely on the user to understand activation, roaming settings, APNs, QR codes, and troubleshooting. How much of enterprise eSIM success depends on removing that burden from the employee?

Almost everything depends on it.
Enterprise software lives or dies by whether employees actually use it. And anything that requires someone to understand APN settings, scan a QR code, or activate a plan before a 6am flight will not be used consistently. It will be bypassed, expensed around, or simply ignored.
Half makes that entire category of friction disappear.
The eSIM is installed once in under two minutes. That’s the last time the employee thinks about it. No QR code for the next trip. No plan to select, no plan to purchase, no support call when they land somewhere unexpected. The moment they arrive, Half automatically activates a 24-hour unlimited plan on the best available local network. They didn’t do anything. It just works.

Fleet manager handles provisioning centrally. The employee does nothing. And because there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to get wrong.
Simplicity isn’t a feature we added on top of the product. It is the product as much as the network coverage, the pricing model, or the dashboard. Because the best connectivity solution is the one employees don’t have to think about.

Q10. The market is moving from “buy a data plan” to “manage connectivity.” What should an enterprise eSIM dashboard actually show to be useful, not just decorative?

A useful dashboard answers the questions that used to require a finance investigation.
Who is roaming right now? Which countries are active this week? What has each employee cost to date this month? Are there employees traveling without an eSIM?
But Half’s dashboard goes beyond visibility. It’s where connectivity is governed.
Travel managers set data roaming policies directly from the dashboard: which employees get access, which destinations are covered, when connectivity activates. And for each employee, which plan applies: Eco for light usage, Pro for standard business travel, Max for bandwidth-intensive missions. Policy is set once. It applies automatically, everywhere.

From there, the dashboard gives real-time visibility on every eSIM in the fleet: who is connected, where, on which network, right now. No lag, no end-of-month discovery.
And the invoice is live. Not a bill that arrives thirty days after the fact: a running cost visible to finance and travel managers at any point in the month. Full transparency, zero surprises.
The goal is to turn roaming from a reactive cost centre into something a CFO can govern, a travel manager can control, and an IT team can deploy without thinking twice.
That’s the difference between a dashboard that’s decorative and one that’s operational.

Q11. There is growing interest in workforce connectivity, duty of care, and travel risk management. Do you see Half eventually becoming part of a broader enterprise mobility stack?

Connectivity is the foundation. And we’re just getting started.
Half already integrates where it matters most: security, billing, and the broader enterprise stack. But the travel ecosystem, both in B2B and B2C, is still largely uncracked. No one has truly embedded connectivity into the travel management layer. That’s the next frontier, and it’s one Half is positioned to own.
The data Half generates is uniquely valuable: who is where, when, connected through which network, on which plan. That signal is relevant far beyond the eSIM — duty of care, travel approval workflows, expense reconciliation, real-time risk management. The integrations with travel management platforms, HR systems, and security tools are a natural next step. Early enterprise customers are already asking for them.
But the longer arc is bigger.
The future of enterprise mobility isn’t just roaming. It’s becoming the default data connectivity layer for the modern enterprise : domestic and abroad. As work becomes more distributed and device-first, the question of “how does this employee connect” becomes infrastructure-level. And as collaboration tools mature, the phone number itself may matter less and less. What matters is seamless, secure, managed connectivity: wherever the employee is.
Half is built to be that layer. Not just for the trip to Singapore. For every moment an employee needs to be connected, anywhere in the world.

Q12. How do you see operators reacting to this new wave of enterprise eSIM players? Are they competitors, suppliers, partners, or all three?

All three! And the balance shifts depending on the operator.
At the infrastructure level, operators are our suppliers. We buy wholesale connectivity from them to power the Half network across 200+ countries. That relationship isn’t going away.
At the account level, some are competitors. Larger operators have enterprise roaming products of their own, and we will sometimes find ourselves in the same conversation with the same customer.
But the most interesting dynamic is the third one: operators who recognize that Half reaches enterprise segments they structurally struggle to serve. The sales motion is different. The product expectations are different. A traditional MNO isn’t built to deliver a per-day pricing model, a live fleet dashboard, or automatic plan activation on arrival. We are.

The operators who see that as a threat will try to defend their position. The ones who see it as a distribution opportunity will move faster and go further.

And some already have. Several large operators have approached Half to distribute the solution as a white label : their brand, our infrastructure and product. That tells you something: even inside the operator world, there’s a recognition that building this from scratch is harder than partnering with someone who already built it.

The shift to enterprise eSIM isn’t something operators can stop, and it is a wholesale opportunity for them.
The question is whether they get on the right side of it.

Q13. One big question in eSIM is ownership of the customer. In your model, does the company own the relationship, does Half own it, or does the employee still have some control?

Three layers. Three different owners.
The company owns the policy and the billing relationship: who gets access, which destinations are covered, which plan applies, what the spend limits are. That governance sits entirely with the employer. Half owns the connectivity infrastructure: the network agreements, the automatic activation, the fleet dashboard, the pricing model. The layer the company never has to think about.
The employee owns the experience. And that’s the part that matters most in practice.
We’re not building a consumer brand employees feel loyalty to.
We’re building something they barely notice, because it works invisibly.
They land, they’re connected, they do their job. No decisions, no friction, no support ticket.

Company control at the policy level. Employee simplicity at the usage level.

That’s the design principle behind the entire product, and it’s what makes Half work in a corporate environment where the buyer and the user are never the same person.

Q14. What type of company is Half best suited for today, and equally important, who is it not for yet?

Half is built for companies that have outgrown “just use your carrier plan” but want infrastructure, not another carrier negotiation.

Today, Half targets two clear sweet spots:
Mid-sized enterprises / 1,000 to 5,000 employees.
International presence, teams rotating across multiple countries, travel that’s frequent and often short-notice. A consulting firm cycling through client sites across the continent. A tech company with commercial teams spread across the US and Asia. A professional services firm running projects in emerging markets. These companies have a real roaming problem, feel it on every invoice, and have no real solution yet. Half is that solution.

Large corporations / 5,000+ employees.
Global footprint, complex fleets, dozens of destinations active at any given time. The pain is bigger, the waste is larger, and the need for centralized governance is acute. A single dashboard covering the entire fleet, real-time cost visibility, automatic activation in 200+ countries: this is exactly what that scale demands and what operators have never delivered.

Not yet addressable: SMEs and SMBs. The problem exists there too, but the buying motion, the IT infrastructure, and the deployment model aren’t the right fit for Half today. It’s a market we’ll get to. It’s not where we start.

The common thread: companies that know roaming is broken, have felt it on an invoice, and are ready to fix it properly.

Q15. If we look three years ahead, what changes first in enterprise roaming: pricing, distribution, procurement, or user expectations?

One eSIM. Every country. No roaming. Half consolidates enterprise connectivity into a single service: one data eSIM that works at home and abroad, with zero carrier complexity. And as satellite networks mature, we’ll extend that coverage to wherever work takes people next

The enterprise roaming market is about to be disrupted. Here’s why.

The trigger isn’t pricing. It’s not procurement. It’s the people walking through the door.

Today’s employees grew up on AiraIo. They know that seamless global connectivity exists: they use it on their personal phones. When they join a company that still hands out roaming packs or tells them to find a SIM at the airport, they notice. And they’ll start asking why.

That expectation gap is already opening. Procurement will follow. Pricing models are already moving: per-day, flat-rate, usage-based. Distribution is next, as connectivity gets embedded into travel booking and expense platforms.

Half is built for where this is going. One eSIM, all countries, managed centrally. The consumer experience, delivered at enterprise scale.

Final Thoughts about enterprise roaming & Half. eSIM role

Half is arriving at the right moment, although not in an empty market.

Enterprise eSIM is already becoming a recognizable category. Business-focused platforms now offer centralized spending and usage visibility, remote eSIM assignment, daily unlimited plans, fleet management, MDM integrations, and zero-touch provisioning. Half therefore cannot rely simply on being an “eSIM for business” or on offering another management portal. Those capabilities are quickly becoming expected.

Its more convincing differentiation is the operating model behind them: one reusable profile, automatic connectivity on arrival, daily rather than per-gigabyte pricing and policies managed centrally before the employee travels. In other words, Half is trying to remove the transaction from travel connectivity. The employee should not have to select a destination, estimate consumption, purchase a bundle or ask IT what to activate.

That is a sensible response to how business travel actually works. European business travel spending is forecast to reach €389.9 billion in 2026, and the average overnight business trip lasts just over three nights. For companies managing frequent, short and sometimes unexpected trips, a predictable daily cost may be easier to budget than a collection of destination packs, roaming allowances and employee reimbursements.

Still, enterprise buyers will look beyond the headline promise of unlimited data and savings of up to 70%. Half will need to prove how consistently its model performs across destinations, what “unlimited” means in practice, how hotspot use and fair-use policies are handled, how quickly support responds and how easily the platform integrates with MDM, security, expense and travel-management systems. A strong dashboard is useful; dependable connectivity and enterprise-grade accountability are what turn it into infrastructure.

The wider market signal is more important than any single feature. Travel eSIM is moving from a product purchased for one journey to a connectivity layer managed throughout the employee lifecycle. The consumer market made instant international connectivity feel normal. The enterprise market will decide who can make it controlled, secure, and almost invisible.

Half has a credible answer to that challenge. Its strongest idea is not that companies can buy roaming more cheaply, but that employees should no longer have to manage roaming at all. Whether it becomes a major enterprise platform will depend on execution, network quality and integration depth—not on the promise of another inexpensive data plan.