Top 5 eSIM & Connectivity Trends for 2026

By the start of 2026, the convergence of AI, 5G standalone architectures, and the SGP.32 standard has transformed connectivity from a simple utility into a fully programmable, intelligent software asset.  

In this article we’re going to explore the five defining trends of the next stage of the market, detailing how embedded telco models, advanced entitlement servers, and autonomous orchestration are actively reshaping the global mobile landscape. 

Predicting the Future is Hard 

The telco landscape has been reliably difficult to predict for at least the last decade, being at the forefront of digital transformation and the most radical emergent use-cases in any industry.  

By 2026 some of the initial rush of innovation has begun to stabilize, with many of the technologies reaching a period of industrial maturation, characterized by the convergence of 5G Standalone (SA) architecture, the widespread IoT adoption of the GSMA SGP.32 standard, and the enforcement of rigorous, harmonized regulatory frameworks like the EU Cyber Resilience Act.  

With the increasing maturation of the market, it becomes a little easier for analysts to discern which trends are solidifying into foundational principles, but here are five of the key fields that 1GLOBAL suggests are worth looking out for in 2026. 

1. Global MVNO & Embedded Telco Expansion 

By 2026, the old binary distinction between traditional telecommunications providers and digital service providers will be a fair way along to eroding completely. The Embedded Telco model has matured from a niche service into a dominant strategy for retention, diversification, and customer stickiness across fintech, travel, and consumer tech sectors. This shift is driven by the commoditization of basic connectivity and the imperative for brands to deepen their customer relationships. 

MVNOs and Travel eSIM 

The direction of the MVNO market, at least for the first half of 2026, will almost certainly be defined by the convergence of travel-specific eSIM offerings and full-service MVNO operations.  

Historically, these were distinct market segments, with travel eSIMs operated as data-only, app-activated utilities for temporary connectivity, mostly used by savvy business travelers to bypass roaming fees. In contrast, MVNOs focused on domestic, recurring subscriptions. However, market data leading into 2026 indicates that these value propositions have merged to serve the global market overall.    

This convergence is mostly driven by the appeal of revenue predictability and rising customer acquisition costs. Travel eSIM revenue, while high margin, is intermittent, while more traditional MVNO subscriptions offer the stability of regularly recurring revenue.  

Consequently, businesses positioning themselves for telecom market entry in 2026 are eyeing a best-of-both hybrid model that offers recurring domestic plans to anchor the customer, supplemented by instant high-margin travel eSIM add-ons. This creates a stickier customer experience where the user relies on a single provider for both home and away connectivity.    

This hybrid approach is facilitated by the maturation of the Connectivity-as-a-Service (CaaS) model, where MVNO-in-a-Box capabilities are delivered alongside travel eSIM enablement as a packaged solution. Brands no longer need to negotiate separate wholesale agreements for domestic and international access, as infrastructure providers increasingly combine these into a single API endpoint.    

Market watchers have already seen this trend reaching a new peak with high-profile market entries from previously entirely non-technical businesses. FC Barcelona’s Barça Mobile service shows the power of good integrated branding. By launching a global travel eSIM across 170+ countries, the football club is leveraging a massive global fanbase. Similarly, in the United States, cable giants like Charter Communications and Comcast have evolved their MVNO partnerships to develop business-focused mobile services, highlighting how the model’s future looks to be primarily in the enterprise segment.    

Fintech & Super Apps 

The unexpected level of synergy between connectivity and financial services represents one of the most interesting areas of development going into 2026. Mobile connectivity has become a competitive arena for fintech, neobanks, and challenger banks seeking to reduce churn and bolster decreasing Customer Lifetime Value.    

Digital-only banks are increasingly signaling a shift in how financial institutions engage customers. The business logic is that mobile connectivity means high-frequency engagement, and while a user might check their banking app once a day, their interaction with the network is constant. By embedding connectivity, fintech can create a symbiotic ecosystem where banking and mobile services are inextricably linked and mutually reinforcing.    

There are four primary motivators for neobanks entering into the connectivity space: 

• Churn Reduction 
  Bundling connectivity with banking decreases motivation to switch. This results in higher retention rates for core financial products because a user is less likely to switch banks if it also means finding a new mobile plan.    

• Data Insight 

  Combined access to mobility and usage data means better customer prediction, credit risk modelling, granular product offers and general KYC.    

• Brand Continuity 
  Having your brand as the phone’s carrier label (SPN) increases brand equity and creates daily visibility, meaning every digital interaction begins and ends fully branded. 

• Diversification 
  Generating new revenue from data plans helps offset many of the fees that are declining across the sector, such as interchange charges and subscriptions to core products.    

More cautious voices in the industry have observed that while the tech has lowered the barriers to entry, the commercial sustainability remains nuanced. Any business trying to run its own MVNO is going to have to tackle digital engagement, architecture management, and a whole new set of rigorous compliance regs that differ significantly from the banking variety.    

This necessitates partnerships with sophisticated enablers that can handle the regulatory and technical heavy lifting. For example, adding connectivity to its fintech ecosystem without needing to establish a core network. Such a full partnership allows fintech businesses to own the user interface, while 1GLOBAL manages the complex telco backend.    

The API Economy 

The popularity of embedded telco is growing against a backdrop of market pressure on traditional MNOs. Across Europe, telecom prices have been falling for more than a decade, Italy having seen price drops of 30% over the last ten years. Meanwhile, operators are also obligated to pour billions into next-gen architecture, with global CAPEX recently exceeding €280 billion annually for 5G and fiber rollouts.    

This gap between rising costs and flat revenues motivates MNOs to embrace the wholesale/MVNO model to monetize their networks more effectively. Solutions like 1GLOBAL’s "Telco-as-a-Service" mean businesses can white label an entire telco stack. This includes access to a core network with worldwide reach, over 600 roaming agreements, and full compliance handling.  

2. Advanced Entitlement & Policy Control 

As 5G Standalone (SA) networks become the norm in most major markets, the Entitlement Server (ES) has proportionally evolved from a niche device-pairing utility into a critical engine for network monetization and policy enforcement.  

By 2026, the ES is the central orchestration point for virtually all advanced 5G services, handling the relationship between user's subscriptions, device capabilities, and network resources. 

Monetization via Entitlement Server  

Until fairly recently, entitlement servers were mostly used to authenticate companion devices like smartwatches and enable IP services like VoLTE and VoWi-Fi. By 2026, their role will have expanded to control access to the next generation of premium features, such as 5G Network Slicing.  

Put most simply, slicing allows operators to create multiple virtual networks on the same hardware, each network optimized for specific needs such as ultra-low latency, high availability, or enhanced security. However, carving out special slices is only as good as knowing who to serve them to.   

The ES is the gatekeeper responsible for verifying user's eligibility for a specific slice and provisioning the necessary configuration.  

Connectivity in 2026 is going to heavily leverage ES wider functions for advanced 5G Services such as Multi-Device Orchestration to synchronize subscriptions across phones, tablets, and wearables. Another feature that’s going to grow in popularity will be ‘Silent Authentication’, which utilizes EAP-AKA to verify device identity without user intervention, further reducing onboarding friction during Zero Touch provisioning.  

Similarly, ES enhanced transfer flows will streamline secure transfer of eSIMs between devices (e.g., iPhone to iPhone) via ES validation, reducing customer care costs and improving the upgrade experience that is so essential for customer stickiness.    

Ecosystem Integration 

Few business or consumer environments these days work on a single OS, so architecture that is agile across systems and brands is increasingly essential. ES are deeply involved with balancing and negotiating across specs and enabling new features as they become available to specific OS. In 2026, Android and iOS will fully integrate network slicing support. Meanwhile, Android devices are due to start allowing enterprise IT admins to route work profile traffic to a dedicated corporate slice using the ‘DevicePolicyManager’ API, a process that depends on the ES.    

For MNOs, it’s been a long-running challenge to maintain compatibility with the rapid and diverging release cycles of Apple, Samsung, Google and many more APAC brands making their initial entry into Western markets. Solutions like the 1GLOBAL Entitlement Server provide an abstraction layer, ensuring that a single integration supports multiple entitlement specifications (TS.43, proprietary OEM specs) and device types.  

This reduces the operational burden of constant updates and ensures features like Subscription Transfer work smoothly across a dozen different generations and brands.    

3. Cross-Border & Multi-Network Connectivity 

While 2026 is sure to see a raft of new concepts being introduced into the telco sphere, one that’s bound to keep fading away is the idea of ‘roaming’. Once an unwelcome surprise to holidaymakers and traveling businesses, the whole model of roaming continues to be systematically dismantled and replaced by localized connectivity. The shift is being powered by the ongoing adoption of the GSMA SGP.32 standard for IoT and the rise of multi-network orchestration platforms that can dynamically manage profiles across borders. 

SGP.32 in IoT 

2026 is going to see full rollout of the SGP.32 spec, representing the most significant disruption to the IoT connectivity landscape in a decade.  

The predecessor M2M standard (SGP.02) relied on SM-SR and SMS-based triggers, which created provider lock-in and integration headaches. The consumer standard (SGP.22), while flexible, required user intervention (such as QR codes and screen prompts) making it unsuitable for remote and autonomous devices.    

SGP.32 has bridged the gap. Being designed specifically for network-constrained and remote devices, it introduced the eSIM IoT Remote Manager (eIM). This standardized element replaces the complex SMS triggers of SGP.02 with IP-based protocols, and allows enterprise to control the profile switching process directly, rather than relying on the operator's SM-SR.    

Through 2026, SGP.32 will increasingly be leveraged by enterprises to switch connectivity providers to optimize costs or coverage, and fade out the issue of vendor lock-in. 

Rise of the eSIM Orchestrator 

As enterprises deploy fleets of ever greater sophistication and global scale in 2026, relying on single MNOs is going to be less and less practical due to permanent roaming restrictions and coverage gaps. Through 2026, the eSIM Orchestrator will continue to gain traction, which provides ‘single pane of glass’ profile management of multiple operators through a unified cloud-based portal.  

Satellite and Non-Terrestrial Networks  

One of the most exciting market features of 2026 is set to be the mainstream integration of multi-orbit satellite networks into standard connectivity packages. The 3GPP’s Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) specifications allow standard 5G devices to connect via satellite when terrestrial coverage fails.  

‘Satellite-to-Mobile’ services represent partnerships between mobile carriers and satellite operators, which will ensure that the old enemy of no signal ‘dead zones’ are finally eliminated for critical enterprise assets.    

4. eSIM Security & Regulatory Compliance 

It’s not news to anyone in the telco industry that 2026 won’t be making the regulatory environment any easier to navigate. From one end of the field, cybercrime and bad actors will continue to mutate, while at the other end of the legal spectrum are the regulatory authorities imposing new data sovereignty requirements. 

The Cyber Resilience Act  

The European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is going to be a whole new industry landmark. Fully applicable by late 2026/2027, it requires that all "products with digital elements" (aka PDEs) that enter into the EU market meet new and rigorous cybersecurity standards. This definition is broad, and under some interpretations covers anything that runs on electricity and is smarter than a toaster, including hardware, software, cloud services, eSIMs, RSP platforms, and all the devices they connect.    

Manufacturers and operators, here dubbed "economic operators", will get some significant new legal obligations, including:  

• Security by Design 
  Products must be demonstrably designed with security as a foundational element, not added as a patch. 

• Vulnerability Handling 
  Manufacturers must have established processes and a five-year roadmap for identifying and patching vulnerabilities. 

• Mandatory Reporting 
  Significant cyber incidents must be formally reported to a national Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) within 24 hours.    

For RSP providers, this effectively adds a requirement for hardware-backed security updates. Meanwhile, the Security Accreditation Scheme for UICC Production (GSMA SAS-UP) standards are evolving to align with CRA requirements, and by September 2026 all cryptographic computations for sensitive process data will have to integrate Hardware Security Modules (HSM) that are FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified “or equivalent”. Non-compliance with these deeply technical requirements will effectively mean a total bar to entry for the European market.    

Data Sovereignty and Local Breakout 

While technology in 2026 will continue to make globally unified connectivity an ever-more achievable goal, we can also rely on regional data sovereignty laws to put that further out of reach.  The EU's GDPR to China's PIPL and all their regional equivalents will mandate that data related to critical infrastructure, personal identity or location must be stored and processed within national borders.    

There are still reasons to be cheerful in 2026, as solutions such as localized provisioning via SGP.32 mean that operators can download local profiles to ensure that data traffic breaks out locally and stays within the legal jurisdiction.    

Global KYC and Anti-Fraud  

As digital onboarding becomes increasingly standard in 2026, so KYC and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations are tightening. Global KYC standards are set to require an increasingly harmonized approach to verifying identities, while MNOs are under increased scrutiny to counteract ‘SIM farms’ and fraudulent account creation. 

Through 2026, both ES and RSP platforms are integrating more advanced identity verification methods. This includes live biometric checks and real-time government database lookups integrated directly into the eSIM activation flow.    

For the financial sector, specifically service providers with transatlantic scope, new Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) rules coming online in 2026 will require AML and the formal filing of Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR), further integrating telcos into the financial crime prevention apparatus.    

5. AI & Automation in Connectivity Management 

2026 will be the year of AI… as will all the ones after it, according to some. The toolsets have evolved from novel support tool to being central to the whole system of connectivity management. AI agents and predictive analytics are busy redefining how networks are orchestrated, optimized, and maintained, moving the industry in 2026 from being reactive to proactive and autonomous. 

AI Orchestration and Self-Regulating Networks 

The complexity of managing multi-network, multi-slice environments within any sort of timeframe that maintains service levels is no longer on the human scale. AI algorithms are now being deployed to manage eSIM orchestration autonomously, using predictive analytics to forecast network congestion, coverage holes, or latency spikes based on historical data and real-time telemetry.    

Through 2026 a term that’s likely to pick up in popularity is “Intent-Based Networking” – which put very simply is an evolution of rules-based switching. Operators define goals such as sub 20ms latency for a device fleet, and the AI orchestrator automatically configures the RAN, core network, and transport layers to fulfil this requirement. If performance degrades, the system dynamically reallocates resources, switches devices to a different 5G slice, etc.  

AI Agents  

Customer interaction is being redefined by AI Agents capable of executing multi-step objectives and actually doing something about service requests. Unlike the chatbots of 2025 that were essentially animated contact directories that would simply put customers in contact with the right person, the 2026 AI agents connect directly to a business’s backend tools (BSS/OSS) to perform complex tasks themselves.    

For example, if a user reports a connection issue, an AI Agent could access network diagnostics, identify an outage, issue a downtime refund, provision a temporary profile, and apologize to the customer – all without waiting for human intervention. 

For MVNOs, this level of automation is going to be critical for scaling. It allows for a high-quality customer experience without the gradual acquisition of support staff.  

Intelligent Roaming and Cost Optimization 

For cross-border connectivity, AI models analyze real-time pricing and quality data from hundreds of roaming partners to select the optimal network for every session. This dynamic selection minimizes wholesale costs for the operator while maximizing performance for the user.    

For instance, 1GLOBAL’s infrastructure leverages such intelligence to manage its 600+ roaming agreements. The system can route traffic based on the specific requirements of the application – sending high-bandwidth video traffic via the cheapest robust pipe, while routing latency-sensitive financial transactions via the highest-quality, lowest-latency path.    

2026 and 1GLOBAL Solutions 

Navigating the opportunity and complexity of 2026, from embedded telco expansion to evolving entitlement sophistication and SGP.32 orchestration, will certainly require a specialist and vertically integrated tech partner.  

In the new year and beyond, 1GLOBAL will offer the industry’s most comprehensive solutions built for this specific landscape.    

1GLOBAL’s Telco-as-a-Service platform will allow fintech and travel brands to embed global mobile services via the Connect API, eliminating infrastructure build-out while ensuring full regulatory compliance. The 1GLOBAL Entitlement Server abstracts 5G’s growing complexity, enabling advanced policy control, network slicing, and multi-device management across iOS and Android.  

Meanwhile, 1GLOBAL’s RSP solutions are already SGP.32-ready and GSMA SAS-SM certified, providing the security and orchestration capabilities necessary to manage global IoT fleets and comply with the EU CRA.  

Contact 1GLOBAL today to learn how, by integrating these critical layers, our solutions empower operators and enterprises to future-proof their connectivity strategies.