The 6 Enterprise Connectivity Challenges of Business Travel

Despite growing environmental awareness and the widespread adoption of videoconferencing tools, remote work programs, and real-time collaborative software in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, business travel is still common practice in international organizations. While the number of corporate travelers is still less than it was pre-pandemic, face-to-face meetings remain an important requirement for many roles. The operational obstacles of corporate travel, from booking transport to prioritizing and planning employee journeys that meet company sustainability policy and net zero goals, are well known.

One of the largest and most complex of these challenges is providing reliable and secure enterprise mobile connectivity.  

In an era of mobile internet, productivity is no longer limited to the workplace. Team members are often expected to join meetings on the go, virtually collaborate on projects, and undertake other data-heavy activities from their mobile devices. For IT admins, accounting departments, and the traveling employees themselves, this presents several potential pitfalls. Here, we explore some of the most common connectivity challenges faced by international teams and discover how recent technological developments like eSIMs and enterprise 5G can address them. From ensuring data security to avoiding roaming fees, here’s how an internationally active workforce can best utilize worldwide mobile connectivity: 

6 challenges of supporting a traveling workforce

1. Spiralling roaming charges

Any organization whose employees regularly travel abroad will be aware that international connectivity services from domestic network providers often fall short. Business plans from these operators rarely cater to the specific needs of global travel. A key component of this is roaming fees – the supplementary charges incurred when using mobile internet outside of the domestic provider’s network range, often charged at several times the local rate.

Roaming fees are the first, and usually the most significant, obstacle facing any company that wishes to provide mobile connectivity to employees abroad. They’re also entirely avoidable. Recent developments in eSIM technology, including products like SmartEnterprise by 1GLOBAL, have made it possible for even the largest multinational enterprises to instantly and remotely connect team members across the world to local mobile networks, without the roaming fees.

2. Unpredictable billing patterns

Roaming rates can vary wildly between countries and network providers. The resulting unpredictability plays havoc with connectivity budgets, increases accounting overheads, and impacts revenue. Multinational businesses often spend hours attempting to budget for their complex international data usage patterns.

Providing mobile internet to employees traveling to other countries is a time-consuming process, divided into three stages – distributing connectivity, monitoring data use, and managing payments.

Using individual local telcos or domestic network providers will require a separate billing procedure for every country of operation.

A holistic service like SmartEnterprise offers a simple alternative: prepaid, international business plans, without the roaming fees. By determining in advance how much data to buy, companies can enjoy the twofold benefit of fee-free business roaming and drastically improved IT and accounting efficiency.

3. Purchasing the wrong data volume

This unpredictability isn’t limited to pricing. Calculating the allotted data volumes for each individual employee is a task in itself, with divergent data requirements even within the same roles.  

Aside from the manual effort of estimating individual data budgets, companies are often faced with the choice of either wasting money on excessively large data plans or purchasing too little data and running the risk of leaving their team stranded. 

Businesses require a service that offers flexible, cost-effective and easily billable mobile data plans in multiple countries.  

Instead of individual data allowances, plans like SmartEnterprise solve this issue by providing a single, shared pool of data for all employees to draw from, regardless of location. This is made possible by 1GLOBAL’s worldwide core network which provides uniform data rates across 160+ countries.

A tiered list of enterprise connectivity plans allows managers to find the right fit for their workforce, with tailored regional and global plans catering to a range of team sizes.

4. Unreliable data speeds and coverage

While many of these challenges concern HR, accounting, and IT departments, international business roaming presents several obstacles to the traveling team members themselves. One of these is the fluctuation in mobile internet speed and availability across regions and jurisdictions. Domestic network providers offer limited access to local networks in other countries, resulting in uneven data speeds and patchy coverage while traveling. As well as impacting employees’ ability to work on the go, unreliable mobile data connections present the temptation to join unsecured public Wi-Fi networks instead.

A global core network like 1GLOBAL partners with over 600 carriers to provide consistent 4G/5G speeds and far-reaching coverage across the globe. A team using such a plan can reliably collaborate on even the most data-intensive tasks like video calls, live video editing, and collaborative project software.

5. Security risks

The allure of public Wi-Fi is clear – when available, it’s often free and can be accessed within seconds. Unfortunately, public Wi-Fi is also incompatible with business use. Unsecured networks are constantly at risk of breach, and accessing any sensitive information on an open Wi-Fi network can have knock-on effects for the entire organization. Packet sniffing or malicious hotspot attacks are forms of cyberattack specifically designed to target users on public Wi-Fi networks.

While business travelers should be made aware of the risks of Wi-Fi, organizations themselves have a duty to provide them with a viable alternative: travel plans with poor coverage or unpredictable data volumes only provide an incentive to use Wi-Fi where available.

6. Managing physical SIM cards

For both private and corporate customers, travel SIM cards have long been a popular option to avoid roaming fees when traveling. For an individual user, a local SIM is a cost-effective and relatively simple method to avoid roaming fees. When used in a business context, however, the advantages pale in comparison to the logistical and accounting effort of individually deploying, monitoring, and recalling these tiny plastic cards for specific employees, often in other countries or continents. This can make them impossible to arrange at short notice, and comes with an ever-present risk of loss or damage.

It also requires employees to replace their existing SIM with a local one when traveling for work purposes. Not only does this impact employees, it makes it harder for organizations to implement BYOD (bring your own device) policies.

How can businesses address these issues?

1. eSIMs

In the last decade, two major developments in the corporate telco space have helped make reliable, fast, and secure team connectivity a reality: eSIMs and enterprise 5G. 

A successor to physical SIM cards, eSIMs are software-based SIM profiles that can be downloaded to a device, rather than inserted physically. A mainstay of IoT and M2M smart devices since 2012, eSIMs have been rapidly adopted by consumer device manufacturers too: by 2030, eSIMs are expected to facilitate 98% of all smartphone connections in North America.  

For organizations, eSIMs offer a raft of security, convenience, environmental and efficiency advantages over their material counterparts. Unlike a plastic SIM, an eSIM can be remotely and instantly deployed to a mobile device on the other side of the world. Previously, something as essential as porting a number or activating a data plan for a team member in another country required international postage or even travel. Today, this can be done in seconds via the 1GLOBAL eSIM management platform.  

A software-based eSIM solves the issues presented by physical SIMs. An eSIM works seamlessly alongside any device’s existing SIM, allowing users to switch between the two in seconds. An eSIM-based product like SmartEnterprise integrates with either corporate devices or employees’ personal handsets.  

• From a purely logistical standpoint, the laborious process of issuing, monitoring, recalling, and storing SIM cards is greatly simplified.

• From a security and management perspective, the benefits are even greater. Organizations can activate and oversee hundreds of SIM profiles simultaneously from one central platform. In-depth analytics and real-time insights can be gleaned at any time, providing a new level of understanding of team mobile usage and requirements.

2. Enterprise 5G

Enterprise 5G is a recent development in the connectivity industry, first appearing in 2019. The technology addresses a prior thorn in the side of corporate IT departments: providing employees with a consistently high standard of mobile internet across different countries.

Organizations need to provide a solution that matches or exceeds the speed and convenience of public Wi-Fi networks, as well as allowing their team members to reliably work online and stay connected.

Enterprise 5G solves this issue across the globe. 1GLOBAL’s recent partnership with Nokia integrated Nokia's 5G support into the SmartEnterprise network, ensuring SmartEnterprise users have global, secured access to high-speed mobile internet.

SmartEnterprise by 1GLOBAL

SmartEnterprise is a prepaid international roaming solution for companies that need a cost-effective, reliable, and secure way to connect their employees around the world. By providing all team members with an eSIM that connects to the 1GLOBAL worldwide mobile network, SmartEnterprise users can get online in over 160 countries without paying roaming fees. 

SmartEnterprise plans are prepaid, meaning a single contract regardless of location, number of users, or data volume. By integrating with companies’ existing Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems, 1GLOBAL SmartEnterprise plans can be used on employees’ own devices (BYOD). This removes the need to purchase separate corporate devices, and suits employees who prefer to use their own handsets.  

Postpaid Enterprise Plans 

1GLOBAL also offers customized postpaid enterprise plans – learn more about these plans and find the perfect one for your organization by reaching out to our team today