5 Ways to Reduce Business Roaming Costs

Staying connected while traveling internationally is a necessity for today's business professionals. However, traditional roaming solutions can quickly become punishingly expensive when individual and teams travel frequently. 

Thankfully, the days of astonishingly high roaming bills awaiting unsuspecting tourists upon their return home are largely over, thanks to modern data networks and the widespread adoption of eSIM technologies. There are still significant cost-benefits, big enough to be appreciated even by enterprise-scale business, to be gained by intelligently and effectively leveraging eSIMs and their management platforms to better streamline your team’s international connectivity.

This blog takes a look at some of the best-proven, practical and actionable methods that business decision-makers have employed to eliminate bill-shock from their roaming costs without compromising on efficiency or convenience.

Constantly increasing demand

For context, it's important to understand why managing roaming costs is so crucial for a modern business with any scope beyond the purely local. Even if business trips and international roaming aren’t daily team activities, having a policy and solution for when it does become necessary will radically improve outcomes, and your bottom line.

Without a proper policy and plan, standard international data roaming for business can quickly become a significant expense, even when using an eSIM, with the costs piling up just from essential office tools like video calls or email attachments.     

Although global roaming tariffs have generally tended to remain stable or in some cases have fallen, data consumption by volume of everyday communication continues to increase exponentially. An hour of video calling on Teams with three or more participants can be comparable in data volume to having watched Netflix for the same amount of time. 

This means that even if prices don’t go up, costs are certain to keep increasing, making a proactive strategy essential for managing expenses effectively and keeping connectivity reliable.   

1. Know your needs

To effectively manage your business roaming costs, start with a full review of your current roaming plan. Evaluate it in terms of instances of overage charges, underutilized features, trends in data consumption across different regions and times of year, and how well it's scaled with your business.

Compare this with the potential cost savings associated with transitioning to managed business roaming packs, which can reduce business mobile roaming usage charges by well over 50%. To select a plan tailored to your organization's specific needs, first you need a solid insight into what those needs are.

If you're not sure exactly where to start, a specialist connectivity partner like 1GLOBAL will be happy to help you with this process, without obligation.

Understanding & evaluating costs

To make appreciable cost-saving on your international roaming, a solid understanding of your mobile provider's policies and charges is essential. You have to know what you're paying to find out what you can be saving. These charges and polices can vary significantly between providers and across different destinations, making a thorough review of your mobile plan and roaming rates for frequently visited countries essential.

Leading connectivity partners such as 1GLOBAL will offer full transparency, providing clear information about roaming charges to empower clients in making cost-effective decisions. If your teams are experiencing any kind of bill shock or connection performance issues, it’s a red flag that your provider isn’t clearly communicating the parameters of your agreement. 

A frequently encountered obstacle to a full root-and-branch review of your roaming agreements can be the sheer volume of them, held across multiple regions, tracked by different teams.

Proliferating contracts is absolute poison to efficient cost-management, so it’s highly recommended to find a partner that can globally connect your business under a single, integrated and easily scalable agreement.
 

2. Start with eSIM

The professional, individual and economic benefits of eSIM applications are many. Whole libraries of whitepapers have been dedicated to these benefits and the impact they continue to have on the global communications landscape. To keep focused on the specific goal of reducing professional roaming costs, we’ll consider only the most topline and relevant of the technology’s advantages.

With a travel eSIM, you gain the flexibility to activate a post- or pre-paid data plan directly on a corporate device, bypassing the high costs associated with traditional roaming. eSIMs provide a hassle-free experience with fast and straightforward activation, eliminating the need for a physical SIM card. Due to their ability to seamlessly switch from one carrier to the next, they also offer total network coverage, ensuring optimal service and pricing.   

Like any tech that’s been rapidly adopted by a mass market, a big part of the eSIM appeal has been convenience. Embedded SIMs provide cost-effective roaming and network switching with no fiddling around with physical plastic cards, and are now standard in just about every networkable smart device in production.

Previously, international mobile roaming meant managing a portfolio of SIM cards, each with their own contracts, fee structure, and regional restrictions. Even ignoring the actual subscriptions themselves, this approach meant additional costs in terms of admin, overheads, and the inevitable loss and replacement of various cards and hardware.   

For enterprise-scale business, entire teams had to be tasked with tracking data usage, attempting to enforce policy compliance, and monitoring the various agreements and their invoices. As the reliance on connectivity scaled up, so did the challenges facing those IT and finance departments.

3. Streamline management

One of the most powerful tools that a professional connectivity solution will give its business users, and certainly among the most impactful on the bottom line, is a comprehensive remote management platform.

Remotely manage your devices, data plans, users, administrators, phone numbers, alerts and more all via a single platform from a single provider, anywhere in the world. Simple, centralized connectivity control on one surface means straightforward, stress-free and powerfully cost-effective management of your entire workforce’s global mobility.  

An eSIM-enabled management platform provides easy one-surface control over the mobile connectivity at individual, group and company-wide levels. Core features will typically include:

• Remote Oversight: Admins can add and remove active eSIM profiles and packages from employee devices, streamlining the installation and activation processes.

• Cost Analysis: Integrated analytics can show usage-patterns across whole organizations or individual teams for cost optimization opportunities. 

• Simplified Control: Centralized management dashboards provide comprehensive usage visibility, simplifying inventory tracking and billing reconciliation.

4. Create a roaming policy

All the smart tech in the world won’t help you reduce business mobile roaming usage if your people aren’t onboard. A clear and easily actionable roaming policy is every bit as important as updated hardware.

A roaming communications policy needs to identify and give simple instructions for implementing best practices, set and provision a practical data limit, and provide guidance on avoiding excessive charges.

Easy & low-impact rules

Effective management of roaming costs hinges on a well-defined roaming policy that any employee can follow without it interfering with their work.

The ideal is a single, clear and one-page guideline that outlines acceptable usage practices, sets usage caps, and provides contacts for policy or technical support.

While reducing business roaming costs is an important goal, there’s no point in doing it at the expense of operational efficiency or team morale.  

Encourage compliance

Having your personnel as active and enthusiastic partners is an essential element for roaming cost reduction – or pretty much any corporate policy. By using tools like Management Platforms, administrators can monitor adherence closely and see in what areas and under which circumstances it does not perform optimally.

Managers can encourage ‘data frugality’ by prominently featuring roaming cost effectiveness in a team’s outcome reports.

Educate employees

While worldwide connectivity continues to evolve and become ever more reliable and flexible, human error is still something to contend with. A little extra time invested in staff training on how to manage device roaming settings will save a lot of technical support hours further down the road.

Even if your employees aren’t trained to fix every problem themselves, the very next best thing is through educating them on how, when and where to get in contact with the relevant support teams.  

Stay relevant

It is both a blessing and a curse that the state of global communications technology is rapidly evolving. Smart businesses discover new opportunities every day, but that can also mean that new policies can quickly become outdated.

Not so long ago, instant messaging platforms presented a huge cost advantage over cellular voice calls. By now ‘instant messaging’ also includes video meetings, which can be unexpectedly data intensive and potentially no cheaper than just calling the old-fashioned way.

Therefore it pays to regularly update your policy to keep it relevant, but also review your consumption and needs to find out which of the latest generation of communication and productivity tools your employees are relying on the most. 

5. Leverage technology

 eSIM technology powered by a specialist enterprise connectivity partner is by far the most effective way to cut business roaming costs. However, it’s not the only answer, and there are other tools to consider complementing your efforts with…  

…But maybe not Wi-Fi

When staff are traveling beyond the reach of the company network and don’t have connectivity of their own, the most obvious solutions seems to be just to take it where you can find it. Wi-Fi is now so ubiquitous that in most civic spaces, and certainly every hotel and café, employees on the move can just use open public networks to at least check emails and text-based messaging apps.

According to market research in 2024 by OnePoll, 43% of respondents believed public Wi-Fi to be at least "somewhat safe" – which is an ironic number since the same poll also reported that 43% of respondents had their online security compromised while on public Wi-Fi.

Using public Wi-Fi is unsecure and anyone connected is vulnerable to attack. Hackers can steal professional information or insert malware into corporate devices and networks.  The best way to maintain cybersecurity when using public Wi-Fi is with encryption tech such as a virtual private network (VPN), but even at the best of times the connection quality is likely to be poor.

Public Wi-Fi can be used by your roaming teams as a ‘survival tool’ to bolster incidental connectivity or update the occasional email, but should not be considered a solution to reduce business roaming costs.  

Portable hotspots

While requiring a little extra hardware, portable Wi-Fi hotspots provide a good return on investment in terms of reliable and cost-effective connectivity for teams that travel together frequently. By providing employees with shared access to a centralized secure, high-speed connection, these portable routers can provide uninterrupted productivity and collaboration while on the move.

Most modern smartphones are able to project a modest hotspot, sharing their own cellular connection with a couple of other devices, but specialized travel routers can connect dozens of devices with comparable speeds to what you’d get inside an office Wi-Fi network.

Most importantly, portable hotspots give administrators enhanced control over team security and data consumption by being in charge of the central point of connectivity.  

Productivity assistance

An obvious way to reduce business roaming connectivity costs is to reduce how much business roaming connectivity is needed in the first place. In practice, this solution turns out to be more complicated, and is only recently being cracked by advanced productivity tools powered by AI. 

AI can now summarize long and detailed messages into a couple of easily digestible lines, suitable for reading while on the move. It’s one of the most heavily promoted features for the next generation of flagship smartphones. The Phone 16 models have Apple Intelligence built in, which at the tap of a button will skim an entire message or even conversation chain and produce a paragraph summarizing all the key points, and if any action is expected of the recipient.

These productivity tools are increasingly useful for professionals on the go, but while their roaming cost reductions are as-yet marginal, you can expect them to grow in significance at a rate that will surprise the sector.

Takeaways

Navigating the complexities of business travel expenses, and especially roaming charges, can literally be a full-time job. Transform this burden into an opportunity for savings starts with getting proactive.

Take a close look at your current roaming plan and usage patterns. Establish clear guidelines for employees and empower them to make smart connectivity choices while traveling. Embrace innovative technologies like eSIMs that offer flexibility and cost-effective data. Explore alternative connectivity options like portable hotspots to maximize efficiency and control.

By getting ahead of the issue before bill-shock strikes you can significantly reduce your roaming expenses and unlock tangible benefits for your organization.

Connect with us at 1GLOBAL today, and let's explore how we can help you achieve your cost-saving goals and empower your team with seamless global connectivity.