I have been in a lot of MVNO conversations over the last few years. Across all the major continents. Different markets, different rules, different levels of maturity.
Costs are getting tighter. Margins are thinner than anyone planned for. And tolerance for complexity is basically gone.
MVNOs are not struggling because they lack ambition. They are struggling because the operating models they inherited are not built for what they are trying to do next.
What 2025 is really about
In 2025, scale alone is not saving anyone. Flexibility is:
- Many MVNOs I talk to are thinking about expansion beyond their original market. Sometimes it is a neighboring country. Sometimes it is an entirely new region. The motivation varies, but the challenge does not.
- The moment you expand, everything shows up:
- Taxation
- Currency
- Regulatory differences
- Usage data coming from places you did not expect, in formats you did not plan for.
Most systems look fine until this moment. Then they start to bend. And bending turns into breaking faster than people expect.
The operators doing well right now are not necessarily the largest ones. They are the ones whose systems can absorb change without turning every new country into a six-month project.
Why IoT and enterprise MVNOs are popping up more
One thing that is no longer subtle in 2025 is the growth of IoT and enterprise focused MVNOs.
This is not because they are more exciting. It is because they are more predictable.
Enterprise customers sign contracts. Usage patterns are understood. Revenue models are clearer. That stability matters when consumer margins keep getting squeezed.
But enterprise and IoT also expose weaknesses quickly. Usage does not look like consumer usage. Records come from multiple sources. Rating logic gets complicated. Reconciliation stops being something you clean up later and becomes something you have to get right every day.
If your systems cannot validate usage and protect revenue at that level, enterprise growth becomes a risk instead of a win.
AI is finally showing up where it counts
There is a lot of noise around AI. A lot of it still deserves to be ignored.
But in 2025, I am finally seeing AI used in places that actually matter to operators. Not marketing. Not flashy dashboards. Operations.
Detecting usage anomalies. Flagging reconciliation issues early. Finding patterns that humans miss until the invoice is already wrong.
Manual reconciliation does not scale. Anyone who has tried to reconcile multiple wholesale partners across countries knows this. AI is not replacing people yet, but it is changing how many people you need and what they spend their time on.
The gap between operators who adopt this and those who do not is starting to widen.
Retail and digital are collapsing into one motion
Another shift that feels obvious once you see it is the disappearance of the line between retail and digital operations.
Point of sale, ecommerce, subscriptions, usage billing, invoicing. Customers do not experience these as separate systems. And operators cannot afford to keep managing them that way.
This is not about innovation. It is about cost and control.
Every handoff between systems introduces delay, expense, and risk. When margins tighten, that becomes impossible to justify. MVNOs that simplify this flow move faster and sleep better at night.
What everyone is still complaining about
Despite all of this progress, the pain points have not changed much:
- Product launches still take too long.
- Wholesale reconciliation is still painful.
- Expanding into multiple countries still feels harder than it should.
The root cause is almost always fragmentation. Too many partners. Too many check boxes. Too many situations where something breaks and no one owns it.
Revenue assurance has stopped being a back office topic. It shows up in cash flow. It shows up in partner trust. It shows up when regulators start asking uncomfortable questions.
The question 2026 is forcing
This is where 2026 starts to matter.A United States-based MVNO said something to me recently that stuck.
“For 2026, I want a partner ecosystem where it is clear who is responsible for what and how much it is going to cost me.”
That is the real fork in the road. Some operators will take the conservative path. Small improvements. Slightly clearer reporting. Better tooling layered on top of the same structures. Less pain, but still a lot of complexity.
Others will take a more aggressive path. They will stop behaving like service resellers and start behaving like platform aggregators. They will demand clarity around responsibility. Who owns mediation. Who owns rating accuracy. Who owns reconciliation when numbers do not match.
They will push revenue assurance upstream instead of treating it like a cleanup exercise at the end.
This path is not risk-free. But it is an intentional risk. And intentional risk beats accidental complexity every time.
Where this is headed
By 2026, the advantage will not belong to the loudest brand or the most aggressive marketer.
It will belong to the operators who understand their costs, trust their data, and know exactly where responsibility sits across their ecosystem:
- Flexibility is no longer optional
- Revenue assurance is no longer secondary
- Transparency is no longer negotiable
I look forward to seeing the new trends and innovations in the market next year!
Cheers to 2026!
Guest Blogs are written by carefully selected Experts. If you also want to create a Guest blog then Contact us.