Smart Communications and Ericsson have completed a live trial targeting one of international roaming’s least visible problems: the long route mobile data often takes before it reaches the internet.

The companies tested Ericsson On-Demand’s Roaming Breakout service, which processes a subscriber’s data traffic closer to where the subscriber is traveling rather than automatically routing it back through the home network in the Philippines.

For travelers, that can mean quicker page loads, smoother video calls and less of the lag that can make an otherwise strong roaming connection feel slow.

Why roaming can still feel slow

Traditional roaming often uses home routing. A Smart customer in the United States may connect to a US mobile network, yet the data session can still be routed back toward the Philippines before reaching the wider internet. The radio signal may be excellent, but the traffic is taking a long detour.

Local breakout is designed to shorten it.

READ MORE: Local SIM, Travel eSIM or Roaming?

The GSMA has long documented the latency penalty associated with home-routed roaming, while its 5G roaming specifications support both home-routed and local-breakout architectures. That matters more as travelers rely on latency-sensitive services such as video calls, cloud apps and navigation.

In Smart and Ericsson’s test, US subscriber traffic was routed through a Google point of presence in Virginia instead of returning to Smart’s home network in the Philippines.

What the trial showed

The companies tested services people actually use abroad:

• web browsing;
• video streaming, including 4K content;
• Messenger video calls between the US and the Philippines;
• Messenger video calls between the US and Sweden;
• comparative speed and latency tests.

According to Smart, download speeds reached up to five times the performance seen with conventional routing in some tests. The local-breakout device also delivered a smoother Messenger video call than the device using standard home routing.

“As customer expectations evolve, we continue to actively explore technologies that can transform how our subscribers stay connected while traveling abroad. This successful pilot with Ericsson gives us valuable insights into how next-generation roaming capabilities can help deliver a leveled-up experience for Filipinos wherever their journeys may take them,”

said Roderick S. Santiago, head of network strategy and architecture at PLDT and Smart.

“By enabling a better roaming experience, LBO can also help us uphold the network quality and reliability that Smart subscribers have come to expect, not only in the Philippines but even when they are overseas,” he added.

The goal is clear: make operator roaming behave more like the local connectivity travelers increasingly expect from a local SIM or travel eSIM.

Cloud changes the equation

Ericsson’s approach matters because Smart does not need to build a traditional mobile core in every market where it wants better roaming performance.

Ericsson On-Demand is built on Google Cloud and is designed to let operators deploy core-network functions in different cloud regions. At MWC 2026, Ericsson demonstrated its SaaS-based 5G Core running entirely on Google Cloud at 1 Tbps while supporting one million simulated subscribers.

“This successful pilot demonstrates how our SaaS Core built for Google Cloud, with its ease of creating core networks anywhere in the world, can help transform the roaming experience for mobile subscribers. By enabling data traffic to break out closer to where travelers are located, Ericsson On-Demand’s Roaming Breakout service can significantly reduce latency and improve performance,”

said Bipin Melvin, Ericsson vice president and head of cloud software and services for Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands.

“Together with Smart, we have shown how innovation in roaming can help deliver a more seamless, local-like experience for customers wherever they travel,” he said.

Smart and Ericsson are not alone. BICS already offers roaming breakout over distributed infrastructure and has worked with AWS on cloud roaming. In deployments with SK Telecom, BICS reported response-time reductions of up to 83% and roaming internet performance up to five times faster than traditional international roaming.

READ MORE: Travel eSIMs Are Dismantling Roaming—So Telecoms Are Fighting Back

That comparison matters because roaming quality is becoming a competitive layer of its own. Travelers no longer judge connectivity only by whether the phone connects. They notice whether calls stutter, maps respond quickly and streaming works without buffering.

The commercial questions remain

The trial is promising, but Smart has not disclosed a commercial launch date, the countries that could receive roaming breakout, whether it would apply to all roaming packages, or whether better routing would affect prices.

Those details will decide how significant this becomes. A technically strong service available only in a few markets or premium tiers would be useful, but far less disruptive than a broad improvement across Smart’s roaming footprint.

It also will not automatically make operator roaming the best choice for every traveler. Price-sensitive users may still prefer local SIMs or travel eSIMs. Smart’s stronger opportunity is to keep subscribers on their existing number and operator relationship while narrowing the performance gap with locally routed alternatives.

Conclusion

Smart and Ericsson’s test points to a wider shift: operators are beginning to treat latency and routing architecture as part of the roaming product, not merely back-end engineering.

BICS is moving in the same direction, while GSMA architecture already accommodates local-breakout models. As mobile cores move into cloud infrastructure, there is less technical reason to send every roaming data session halfway around the world simply because roaming was historically built that way.

For Smart, the real question is no longer whether local breakout works. The trial suggests it does. The test is whether the operator can turn it into a broad, transparent and competitively priced commercial service.

If it can, traditional roaming becomes harder to dismiss as the slow, expensive legacy option. It starts to look more like a modern connectivity product — exactly where travel eSIMs have been putting pressure on operators.