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A Zimbabwean electrician in Johannesburg carries two numbers. The South African one gets him work, pays his rent through a wallet, and receives the OTPs his bank sends. The Zimbabwean one is how his mother reaches him and how the family account back home stays verified. He has been doing this for six years, which makes him neither a roaming customer nor a domestic subscriber. The travel eSIM was not designed for him and neither was the local MVNO, and there are roughly 25 million people in Africa living the same way.

The platform was ready in month four. The MVNO went live in month eleven. The seven months in between were spent almost entirely on integrations — specifically, on a number portability adapter that failed certification testing twice, and on an HLR/HSS provisioning interface with the host MNO that required three rounds of technical alignment because the MNO had upgraded its core network between specification sign-off and the testing window.

A European retail bank decided to launch a mobile proposition for its current account customers. They wanted control — over subscriber data, over pricing logic, over the ability to connect mobile usage to transaction history. So they chose a full MVNO model and contracted a BSS platform vendor accordingly. The project took 34 months from commercial decision to live service. By that point, two fintech competitors had launched mobile propositions, attracted a combined 600,000 subscribers, and were bundling banking and mobile in ways the bank had originally planned as its own differentiator.

A mid-sized MVNO reached 400,000 prepaid subscribers and something unexpected happened: margin per subscriber started falling, despite a recently renegotiated wholesale rate with the host MNO. The finance director couldn't explain it. The wholesale rate had improved. ARPU was stable. But the unit economics were worse.