How to Take Control of Your Global Connectivity Costs

Business trips remains a key tool for international trade: global expenditure on corporate travel may already have surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Despite the global adoption of videoconferencing software and remote work during the COVID-19 lockdown, two-thirds of business travelers still feel that travel is critical to career advancement.

Already, there’s speculation that today's climate of increasingly unpredictable international trade relations will lead to greater numbers of in-person meetings and international corporate travel. And as mobile technology continues to progress, remaining connected and working on-the-go has become a standard expectation for business travelers.

Organizations must harness improvements in connectivity to ensure their employees can remain informed, productive, and reachable during travel.

Providing enterprise mobile connectivity, particularly across international borders, poses a series of unique challenges. From operational efficiency to staff retention, new technological developments like eSIMs and Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) can help businesses overcome these challenges and provide employees with the best possible tools for their travels.

These are the key requirements for taking control of global connectivity costs:

1. Ensuring reliable service, worldwide

Cross-border mobile connectivity can vary greatly in quality, especially when relying on a single local carrier in each country. For employees, working with inconsistent data speeds and patchy network coverage can be extremely frustrating and ultimately hinder their ability to do their jobs.

Reliable coverage and connection are the two most essential aspects of enterprise mobile connectivity. A data connection isn’t just needed for remote work — it’s often used for essential services like booking taxis, checking into hotels, and navigating new cities. Failure to provide teams with a reliable mobile signal during work travels can impact more than their efficiency: it’s key to maintaining employee satisfaction.

Roaming fees are another significant connectivity cost for international business. These surcharges are issued by mobile network operators when a user connects to a mobile network outside of their original carrier’s coverage area. For domestic providers, this usually means in any country outside their home (some exceptions, like the European Union & European Economic Area, roaming agreements do exist).

For businesses, roaming fees are a consistent thorn in the side of travel budgets. Not only are they often prohibitively expensive, but the rates can also vary drastically between countries. This makes accurate budgeting an intricate task, rife with hidden costs and unexpected bills.

Joining a worldwide network

By connecting to a single worldwide network instead of a domestic telco operator, business travelers are free to call, text, and get online around the globe without paying roaming fees. A worldwide network operator like 1GLOBAL provides consistently high data speeds regardless of location. By constantly connecting the strongest of several (an average of 3+ networks per country) available local networks, a 1GLOBAL eSIM ensures constant, consistent 4G/5G connectivity. There’s no need to change providers or switch SIMs every time a border is crossed.

With a core network covering 190+ countries and over 600 local partner networks, 1GLOBAL provides near-unlimited coverage for business travelers.

2. Managing connectivity budgets

Many of the challenges businesses face when arranging mobile connectivity plans concern the accounting and logistics departments. Planning, budgeting, and predicting mobile data volumes and costs for multiple countries of operation can be an enormous undertaking.

The knock-on effects from this increased workload are company-wide:

• Increase in accounting overheads

• Greater chance of billing errors

• Increased administrative workload

• Higher cumulative costs incurred by multiple scattered contracts instead of a single agreement for all countries

Accounting departments face four key issues when organizing a mobile connectivity plan:

• Estimating required data volumes

• Deciding on an overall connectivity budget

• Negotiating separate connectivity contracts for every country of operation

• Monitoring individual data usage and adapting connectivity budgets and contracts accordingly

This either leads to organizations overpaying for mobile data that is never used (also known as breakage fees) or risking leaving team members stranded with insufficient mobile data. In either case, the workload required to negotiate and re-negotiate separate contracts with mobile operators in every country of operation is time-consuming, costly, and discourages expansion.

A single contract

Workplaces need a single connectivity provider for every place they do business. 1GLOBAL is a fully-licensed MNO with a unique single core network across 190+ countries. By empowering employees with a 1GLOBAL enterprise plan, businesses can unify their entire connectivity strategy in a single, personalized contract. Not only does this provide unparalleled flexibility for traveling team members, it also drastically reduces the budget and effort required by accounting and logistics departments.

For business travelers, a single worldwide contract delivers a new level of versatility. Users can rapidly respond to market trends and client requests by heading to new destinations as required, safe in the knowledge that they’ll remain covered through their workplace connectivity plan. This international flexibility promotes growth while reducing overall costs across multiple departments.

3. Understanding data usage

Even when a budget has been established, businesses must be able to change their data needs to maintain their market position and adapt to new situations. In today’s increasingly reactive business world, versatility is fundamental to viability. Ideally, any connectivity plan should be able to evolve regularly to match the brand’s ambitions: rigid structures slow growth and are ill-suited to seasonal or agile business models. Re-negotiating and planning new mobile plans every week or month is often unfeasible. A clear, up-to-date overview of all employees’ data and voice usage is needed.

True data transparency

A 1GLOBAL enterprise connectivity plan gives teams unprecedented insights into their connectivity requirements and allows them to continually adapt their budget to reflect this.

1. One centralized platform provides in-depth metrics of all connected devices globally, including full data transparency and monthly reporting, alongside continual live updates and alerts. By understanding their team's mobile usage, managers can best serve their connectivity needs.

2. As well as metrics, a centralized reporting platform offers organizations the chance to actively manage their worldwide telecommunications. The 1GLOBAL Enterprise platform provides instant oversight of all eSIMs, users, administrators, phone numbers, alerts, and more.

A single, flexible contract with real-time analytics allows businesses to adapt their data usage as required and scale their connectivity needs over time to match wider company growth.

Meeting individual needs

It’s also important to recognize the wide range of reasons people travel for work: every business traveler has their own connectivity requirements, from the data volumes they’re expected to use to the mobile devices they work on. Whether this means organizing connectivity for multiple shared devices or supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, ensuring that employees are empowered to work with their preferred tools, even while traveling, is key to maintaining a motivated team.

International travel is already stressful enough: delivering reliable, secure, fast connectivity to the desired devices helps.

4. Ensuring data privacy and device security

From financial institutions fulfilling their compliance obligations to organizations operating secure BYOD policies, security is an essential consideration for any mobile connectivity plan. Providing employees with a regulated and protected network in which they can access work-related documents and communicate freely is a basic requirement for upholding viable business travel.

Unsecured public Wi-Fi networks are a common threat to enterprise data security. When employees are traveling with insufficient data speeds or volumes, the temptation to switch to Wi-Fi creeps in. While public Wi-Fi can seem like a convenient option for on-the-go connectivity, it presents a web of security risks and potential data breaches. A 2023 report by Forbes Magazine found that most regular international travelers have had their information compromised on a public Wi-Fi network. Despite this, the majority still feel safe using these networks. It’s imperative that businesses close this knowledge gap, both by educating traveling employees and providing a feasible, high-speed worldwide connectivity option instead. Only by ensuring this can they safeguard sensitive information outside of the regular workplace security infrastructure.

Unsecured networks are at constant risk of attack— two of the most common cyberattack techniques, "man-in-the-middle" and “packet-sniffing”, were specifically designed to take advantage of public Wi-Fi networks. With the increasing availability of in-air Wi-Fi, and a younger generation of always-connected employees entering the world of business travel, organizations must act now to provide their teams with a plan that allows freedom to call, text, and get online without resorting to unsecured networks.

Secure mobile data and voice plans

The surest way to avoid team members using unsecured networks is to remove the incentive to do so by instead providing a consistent, high-speed data, SMS, and voice connection, shareable across multiple devices. 1GLOBAL eSIM connections constantly reconnect to the best available local network, avoiding downtime and keeping teams connected over a secure line.

Fully licensed by the GSMA, 1GLOBAL recently partnered with telco giants Nokia to integrate their worldwide cybersecurity measures into all 1GLOBAL cellular plans.

Taking control of global connectivity costs

1GLOBAL is a leading international telco and digital-first connectivity provider, with a single core network comprising over 600 partner networks in 190+ countries. For 1GLOBAL customers, this means 5G mobile network access in nearly every corner of the globe. One single network means no roaming fees and just one roaming agreement for all employees, devices, and countries of operation.

As a telco ourselves, we’re keenly aware of the potential challenges international enterprise connectivity poses. That’s why 1GLOBAL developed a range of custom postpaid enterprise plans that directly address these issues and provide organizations with a new level of reliability, flexibility, and international availability. Regardless of where their work takes them, 1GLOBAL Enterprise users experience global connectivity with the security and service of a fully-licensed local MVNO. 1GLOBAL clients include some of the world’s most recognizable brands across a variety of industries. All 1GLOBAL postpaid plans are customized and based on careful consultation with an expert team, providing the ideal connectivity solution for any-sized company. Speak to our team today to learn more about integrating 1GLOBAL Enterprise Connectivity in your organization.