Dmitri Verbovski, Yesim Founder.
Staying connected has become a basic need—the kind you stop noticing until it breaks. At home, the problem is largely solved: multiple providers, dozens of plans and real competition on price. Cross a border, and it falls apart. You land, turn off airplane mode and within seconds, your carrier explains roaming terms—zone tiers, daily caps and per-megabyte rates. Beyond Europe’s Roam Like Home directive, it’s still a tangle of asterisks and prices with little relationship to what data really costs to deliver.
And yet the industry keeps calling this “unlimited.”
I’ve always believed that connectivity should work the way every other digital service already works—instantly, transparently, on your terms. What we have instead is a pricing architecture designed for a different era of mobility and data consumption. That mismatch is now impossible to ignore.
The Move To ESIM
Roaming zone systems were designed when mobile internet abroad was an occasional luxury—a quick email check, nothing more. These structures weren’t built to be transparent. Many operators have resisted changes that make switching easier because pricing opacity is a retention mechanism. The technology has scaled but the billing logic hasn’t moved.
With the iPhone 17, Apple made eSIM-only standard across all markets—a milestone signaling how thoroughly the technology has entered the mainstream. Android manufacturers moved earlier. In China, ABI Research projects accelerated rollout in 2026 as major operators finalize approvals, with China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom already licensing eSIM services. Mordor Intelligence valued the global eSIM market at over $11 billion in 2025, growing 14% annually through 2030—a figure The Business Research Company independently corroborates.
Once a SIM profile is software, connectivity becomes programmable. Plans can be scoped to a trip, region or usage pattern and priced transparently. As physical SIMs disappear, the “operator on day one” moment shifts from a carrier store to an app—and the platform managing activation, network switching and billing becomes, functionally, the new carrier.
Connectivity Is The New Subscription
Think about what happened to music. For years, the model was transactional: per track, per album. The infrastructure to deliver music digitally existed long before pricing caught up with how people wanted to listen. Then streaming arrived, and within a decade, the logic flipped. Nobody buys individual tracks anymore. You subscribe, and it follows you.
Telecom pricing is at that inflection point. UN Tourism data shows over 300 million international trips in the first quarter of 2025 alone, up 5% year-on-year. That population—tourists, digital nomads, frequent business travelers and enterprise field teams—doesn’t want to negotiate a data plan before every departure. They want connectivity that follows them.
What Comes Next
The road ahead isn’t complicated to describe. You won’t buy a roaming plan. You’ll have a connectivity account—one interface, one relationship—that routes you to the best available network wherever you are, adjusts to your usage and bills without surprises.
But transparent pricing is only the beginning. The next stage is genuinely personalized connectivity, where the app knows where you’re going before you think to check, selects the optimal network automatically, purchases the right package based on your travel history and usage, and adjusts to your budget. A frequent traveler to Southeast Asia shouldn’t configure the same plan they set up two years ago. Their connectivity should already know them.
GSMA Intelligence expects global eSIM smartphone connections to reach 4.9 billion by 2030, representing 55% of all smartphone connections. Companies that build that intelligence into the activation layer—not just the billing layer—will own the customer relationship in a way no zone table ever could. In Asia, super apps like WeChat and Alipay reshaped banking not by becoming banks but by owning the interface where financial decisions happen. Connectivity-first platforms are positioned to do the same to telecom.
The enterprise dimension follows the same logic. With distributed work now structurally permanent—a 2025 Stanford and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta survey found only 12% of executives planned stricter return-to-office mandates—mobile connectivity can’t be a travel afterthought. It needs to be forecastable by finance, controllable by IT and manageable in real time, not reconciled from an invoice weeks later.
The eSIM revolution was never about the chip. It was about choice—the ability to connect on your terms, without asterisks.
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