Why Travel eSIM Resellers Choose 1GLOBAL’s Full-Stack RSP Solution

As a pioneer of eSIM technology and one of the foundational figures of the modern telco sector, 1GLOBAL has a unique vantage point when it comes to watching emergent trends in the eSIM market. Recently we’ve been seeing a new generation of recognizable brands in this space, and companies that began as competitors retooling their infrastructure using our technology and joining us as partners.  

In this article, 1GLOBAL provides a unique insight into how the travel eSIM market is maturing, what’s causing the tools that enabled resellers' initial success to now become becoming their biggest obstacles to growth, and why they’re turning to 1GLOBAL for the key to scaling efficiently. 

Market Bottleneck 

While the market and its infrastructure might be maturing, that hasn’t slowed its explosive growth. The travel eSIM sector is forecast to grow to over 280 million installs by 2030, which represents a fourfold increase from 2024 and an increase in value from €1.2 billion to over €4 billion. 

This is being driven by the rebound of international travel, the growing awareness of all the conveniences of avoiding physical SIM cards, and the sheer number of compatible devices. With its CAGR conservatively estimated at above12%, there’s plenty of demand, but the travel eSIM, once a digital gold rush for nimble marketers, is having issues. The same platforms and network architecture that enabled brands to meet the market with speed are now revealing themselves as the biggest obstacles to genuine, sustainable scale.    

This isn't a failure of their business model, nor of the underlying technology, but rather a symptom of its success and evolution. As these travel eSIM providers grow, their needs become more sophisticated, as both they and their customers demand a level of control, flexibility, and efficiency that a simple white-label solution cannot provide.  

Providers are discovering that the path to long-term profitability and market leadership isn't just about cultivating customer relationships, but about properly leveraging the technology stack that underpins it. This is the driving force behind why savvy resellers are making the pivot from being ‘just’ a branded storefront to taking control of their strategic growth by partnering with a true full-stack provider like 1GLOBAL. 

Beyond the White Label 

The structural difference between a travel eSIM reseller and an actual telco provider lies in who owns the stack. The term stack tends to get a little muddied in a telecom context because it gets confused with software engineering where it generally means an all-round professional.  

In telco, it signifies end-to-end ownership of the entire service delivery chain. This includes physical infrastructure like secure geo-redundant data centers and servers, as well as the global core network and its hundreds of agreements and interconnects, most critically the Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) platform.   

In contrast, the typical travel eSIM reseller will operate on a ‘thin stack’ or ‘white label’ model. These businesses will excel at creating a sleek app, building a brand, and acquiring and managing customer relationships – but the core connectivity, the network agreements, and the provisioning technology will all still be owned and managed by an upstream provider.  

This outsourcing of hardware and technological complexity is what allowed for such rapid market entry. However, this is a model with certain diminishing returns since, as a business scales, this kind of outsourcing progressively transforms from a benefit into a source of friction.    

The RSP Platform 

At the center of this ecosystem is the RSP platform. Governed by GSMA standards, RSP is the tech that enables the remote, over-the-air (OTA) management of eSIM profiles, including activating, downloading, switching, and deactivating them without any physical interaction or user prompting. For consumer devices, the key component is the Subscription Manager  – Data Preparation (SM-DP+), which serves as the central command center for the entire lifecycle of a customer's connectivity. It’s not just an update server that pushes a profile, but an automated system that securely generates, stores, and manages every digital SIM a reseller offers in their store.    

A white label reseller may have a strong brand and a great user interface for sales, but they don't control the core product. A full-stack provider like 1GLOBAL owns and controls every step of the process, from the network source to the final delivery of a profile to the end user's device, including the RSP platform itself. 

Upgrade to Ownership 

The distinction between ‘renting’ and ‘owning’ the infrastructure becomes important at scale.  

While a white label platform is an excellent launchpad, a growing reseller inevitably hits a ceiling imposed by their lack of direct control. As their userbase and traffic ramp up, certain critical business challenges will always emerge.  

For example: 

• White label resellers can't design unique, custom data plans to target specific traveler personas.  

• They can't dynamically optimize network routing to ensure the best performance and lowest cost.  

• They can't guarantee service quality or uptime because they're reliant on a third-party infrastructure.  

• Most importantly, they struggle to differentiate themselves from dozens of other resellers who are often using the exact same underlying provider, forcing competition down to a brutal, margin-eroding race to the bottom.    

This is the strategic inflection point where a business can either follow a price war to the bitter end, or start building long-term, defensible value by moving beyond marketing and take control of the product itself.  

They need the ability to innovate, to differentiate and granulate their offering, and to deliver a truly superior experience. This is what drives the need for the greater RSP flexibility, ownership, and efficiency that only a full-stack partner like 1GLOBAL can provide.    

Hitting the eCeiling 

As resellers scale, the limitations of their dependence on upstream carriers and aggregators become increasingly clear, manifesting in several critical business challenges. 

First, there's a lack of agility. When a reseller relies on a provider’s plans, their own product roadmap is effectively set in stone. They can't innovative data bundles for their niche markets, dynamically route traffic to the best-performing local network, or negotiate rates directly with the relevant Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to optimize costs. They’re structurally a step behind, able to offer to their customers only what the provider makes available.   

Second is the RSP blind spot. Without direct access to a Remote SIM Provisioning platform, resellers have no real control over the SIM lifecycle. The ability to dynamically manage and switch IMSIs to optimize for cost, coverage, or compliance is a core benefit of the underlying eSIM standard, yet it's a capability they can't access.  

Third, as volumes grow, so scalability and reliability become a greater concern. In a digital marketplace, even the most brand-loyal of users are mere seconds away from taking their custom elsewhere in the event of obstacles to availability. The days of fiddling around with plastic SIMs are gone, and a customer landing in a foreign country expects instant, like-home connectivity. Any latency (lag), provisioning failures, or network downtime from the upstream provider directly translates into disappearing customers, support tickets, and brand damage. Yet the reseller is powerless to diagnose, fix the root cause, or even offer reassurances as they don't own the infrastructure.    

The 1GLOBAL Solution  

1GLOBAL's full-stack RSP solution is built to solve all of these scaling challenges. We replace dependence with control, opacity with transparency, and fragmentation with seamless, powerful integration. Our offering isn't just another layer in the value chain, but a bedrock platform that empowers resellers to elevate their business model. 

Full Ownership 

We provide RSP-as-a-Service and proprietary infrastructure. We’re a GSMA-accredited provider, and our platform runs from our own SAS-SM certified, geo-redundant data centers located in London and Amsterdam, which are engineered for 99.95% availability. When you partner with 1GLOBAL, you're connecting directly to the source. There are no cut-out intermediaries, no resold infrastructure, and no questions about who manages the security and reliability of your service. This direct-to-source model eliminates the risks of mysterious data routing and provides the telco-grade resilience that a scaling business demands.    

Total Control 

Our platform gives partners complete, granular control over the entire eSIM profile lifecycle. Through our management portal and a comprehensive suite of APIs, resellers can generate, activate, suspend, and manage their eSIM profiles in real time. They can also customize SPN, manage IMSIs/connectivity profiles on the eSIMs to optimize costs by always steering to the best available networks, and offer one eSIM for life, allowing users to top up plans for any country on the same eSIM profile, aiding customer retention.  

This degree of control is transformative, allowing our partners to break free from the rigid, one-size-fits-all constraints of white label platforms and become a true service provider. They design their own bespoke data products, manage their eSIM inventory with precision, and respond instantly to customer support issues, thereby owning their customer experience from end to end.    

Actionable Intelligence  

Partnering with 1GLOBAL enables more than just provisioning, as it delivers critical business intelligence. Our platform gives resellers access to deep usage insights and granular regional data, identifying customer behavior to get ahead of trends, refine pricing and optimize marketing for maximum ROI.  

This data-driven approach is essential for competing effectively in a market that’s entering a new mature phase. We already create over 50,000 new profiles every single day for our 4,000+ corporate clients and partners worldwide. Our systems are designed for high-volume, zero-touch profile installations that are the gold standard of the global travel eSIM market, ensuring our partners can grow without friction.    

As the travel eSIM market continues its rapid maturation, the primary basis of competition is shifting. The initial gold rush of customer acquisition is giving way to a new era where the long-term value of customer retention is the differentiating factor, along with service innovation, that will define the winners. In this new landscape, the companies that own or directly control their RSP layer will hold the strategic advantage. 

From Acquisition to Retention 

For all its growth, the market has become saturated and is seeing customer acquisition costs go up and margins down. As eSIM tech becomes the default, instant connectivity is no longer the significant differentiator that it was for early generations of Apple iPhone. In this mature environment, customer loyalty is won not purely on price but the quality of their experience, unique features, and the trust in constant and stable availability.   

The RSP Advantage  

Cost Control 

Direct Remote SIM Provisioning access from 1GLOBAL enables a provider to negotiate more effectively with MNOs and intelligently optimize network selection in real time, actively managing costs and protecting margins in an increasingly competitive market.    

Quality of Service 

Control over provisioning allows for dynamic profile switching, ensuring that customers are always connected to the best-performing and most cost-effective network in any given location. This has a direct and profound impact on user satisfaction and retention.    

Innovation 

The RSP layer is the foundation upon which all future service innovation will be built, delivering new value-added services such as bundled content subscriptions, sponsored data packages, and integrated IoT connectivity for travel accessories and wearables.    

This evolution is already underway. The market is evolving to incorporate not only eSIM storefronts but also usher in the era of the ‘super app’, where connectivity becomes a feature within a larger travel or lifestyle ecosystem. We see this in fintech like Revolut and airlines like Jazeera Airways, embedding eSIM offerings directly into their platforms to enhance user experience and drive engagement.  

The future of travel connectivity isn't just selling data plans but can also incorporate the growing connectivity-as-a-service model. A reseller with direct RSP control via 1GLOBAL can widen its business model to capitalize on this trend, transforming from a simple B2C app into a B2B2C enabler for the entire travel industry.  

Next Steps in Partnership 

1GLOBAL is positioned not simply as supplier, but as the core infrastructure partner for those ambitious companies that will lead this next phase of the market. We provide the control, intelligence, and scalability required for resellers to transition from being price-takers in a commoditized market to becoming true innovators and market leaders. 

The path from eSIM reseller to global connectivity business runs directly through infrastructure ownership. As the market matures, the brands that thrive will be those that move beyond the limitations of the white label model to take full control of their product, their customer experience, and their destiny. 1GLOBAL’s full-stack, GSMA-certified RSP platform provides the control needed to make that journey successfully. 

The choice for resellers is clear, to either continue competing for thinning margins in an increasingly crowded and commoditized market, or partner with 1GLOBAL to build a truly differentiated and sustainable business.