The telecom industry has spent years debating what eSIM might do to roaming. In 2026, the more interesting question is simpler: why are so few companies making serious money from it?

Mobile World Live’s 2026 eSIM Survey Report gives the uncomfortable snapshot. Only 12% of respondents said they had developed a profitable roaming eSIM business. Forty-five percent said they were not active in the space at all. Another 16% had only a partial solution, 15% were working with eSIM aggregators, and 11% were active but feeling pressure from pure-play competitors.

The 88% figure needs care. The survey covers a broader mix of mobile-industry stakeholders, and “not profitable” is not the same as “not monetized.” Still, profitable execution remains rare.

For telcos still watching, that is an opening.

The window is still open

Calling this a first-mover opportunity needs one qualification. Airalo, Holafly, Nomad and dozens of other travel eSIM brands have already moved. Orange and Vodafone are moving too. Nobody entering now is first to travel eSIM.

But many operators can still be early to doing it well.

That distinction matters because the addressable market is getting larger. Kaleido Intelligence forecasts travel eSIM adoption rising from 12% of global travellers in 2025 to 31% by 2030, with travel eSIMs approaching $10 billion in attributable wholesale roaming revenues for operators by the end of the decade.

READ MORE: eSIM White Label: Launch Your Own Telecom Product

Counterpoint Research sees the defensive side. It expects operator retail roaming revenues to fall by one-third by 2030 as travellers increasingly choose cheaper, more flexible travel eSIMs.

So two revenue stories are happening at once. Operators risk losing some traditional roaming spend while gaining wholesale traffic from the very eSIM providers disrupting them.

The best-positioned operators can play both sides.

Execution is the problem

The usual explanation is that telcos are slow. That is lazy.

A travel eSIM proposition touches billing, provisioning, entitlement, roaming agreements, fraud controls, customer care, digital identity, device compatibility, pricing and distribution. Changing one journey can mean coordinating teams and systems that were never designed to behave like a two-minute travel app.

Mobile World Live’s survey makes the bottleneck unusually visible. Forty-five percent of respondents identified coordination with OEMs, eSIM vendors and entitlement providers as a rollout challenge. Technical integration followed at 41%, while 26% pointed to backend upgrades. Complicated activation was also cited as a consumer-adoption barrier.

READ MORE: Wholesale Roaming in the Age of Travel eSIM

This is where agile travel eSIM brands gained ground. Many started without decades of prepaid stacks, retail processes or roaming-product logic to unwind. They could begin with the journey they wanted: choose destination, choose data, pay, install.

An operator attempting the same flow often has to negotiate with its own history first.

Build less, launch faster

That does not mean every MNO should build a global travel eSIM platform from scratch.

In fact, for a regional operator with limited outbound travel volumes, building everything internally may be an expensive way to prove a point. Partnering with an aggregator, connectivity enabler or white-label platform can shorten deployment and keep capital focused on areas where the operator actually differentiates.

The survey suggests operators are already testing that route: 15% of respondents said they were partnering with eSIM aggregators.

READ MORE: Vodafone Launches Global Travel eSIM Platform for 200+ Destinations

Telefónica Global Solutions has framed travel eSIM as a choice between building and partnering. The broader infrastructure market—from 1GLOBAL and Gigs to roaming hubs and MVNEs—is making the “our stack is too complicated” argument weaker.

The trade-off is control. Outsourcing accelerates time to market, but can also make the offer look like everybody else’s. If pricing, coverage and app flow are interchangeable, the operator becomes another logo selling the same wholesale layer.

Speed matters. So does having a reason to exist.

The operators already testing it

Orange Travel shows what a more deliberate response looks like. In 2026 it expanded distribution through Selectour’s travel-agency network and then signed a global partnership with Trip.com, putting Orange eSIM offers inside the travel-booking journey rather than waiting for customers to visit an operator site.

Vodafone has gone further toward a standalone travel proposition. Its Travel eSIM platform targets customers regardless of their home network and covers more than 200 destinations, with Vodafone positioning it as part of a broader digital travel platform rather than a roaming add-on.

These moves are interesting because neither company is merely digitizing the old roaming pass.

They are competing for a customer who may have no existing billing relationship with them.

That is the opportunity. eSIM can turn roaming from a defensive retention product into an acquisition business: inbound tourists, outbound travellers, airline customers, banking-app users, loyalty members and customers of brands that do not want to become telecom operators.

Distribution becomes the moat

Kaleido’s 2026 wholesale roaming survey offers another clue. A quarter of operators reported incremental inbound traffic or wholesale revenue through direct or indirect partnerships with travel eSIM and alternative roaming providers.

That makes the pure “telcos versus travel eSIM startups” framing increasingly outdated.

READ MORE: Orange Travel eSIM Now Integrated at Selectour

A pure-play provider can be a competitor at retail and a customer at wholesale. An airline can become a storefront. A fintech can own the interface. An MNO can supply the network, launch its own travel brand, or do all three.

The advantage will therefore belong less to whoever has the most complete internal stack and more to whoever chooses a role quickly and executes it coherently.

Conclusion

The first-mover era of travel eSIM is already over. The first-serious-executor era is not.

Orange is building distribution. Vodafone is building a travel brand. Pure plays built consumer habit. Enablers are reducing the technical cost of entry. Meanwhile, nearly half of Mobile World Live’s respondents remain inactive and only 12% report a profitable roaming eSIM business.

That gap will not stay open indefinitely.

For operators, waiting for legacy billing, onboarding and internal ownership to become perfectly tidy is probably the riskiest strategy of all. The practical choice is now build, partner or supply—and be clear about which advantage the company intends to own.

Because in this market, late is still possible.

Invisible is much worse.