Short answer. A brand does not have to pick between reselling SIMs and running a full MVNO once and for all. Most move up in steps. Sky Italia resold Fastweb SIMs from 2024 and launched its own MVNO on 23 September 2026. The model a brand launches with matters less than whether its product catalogue, customer data and billing can move with it to the next one.
Sky Italia sold mobile plans for two and a half years without being a mobile operator. From February 2024, a Sky Mobile SIM was a Fastweb SIM with a Sky logo. Customers who activated one became Fastweb customers, and when Fastweb changed its tariffs, Sky’s tariffs followed, as SmartWorld pointed out in September 2026.
In February 2026, Italy’s industry ministry authorised Sky to operate as an ESP-type MVNO. On 23 September the new Sky Mobile went live on the Fastweb + Vodafone network, with Sky running the service and the customer contracts itself (Il Sole 24 Ore, Broadband TV News).
In network terms the step is small. Sky still has no SIM ranges or number prefixes of its own and uses Fastweb’s. Commercially it is large. Sky now sets its own prices, owns its customer base and bundles mobile with Sky TV and Sky Wifi on its own terms.
That is the decision hiding behind “should we launch an MVNO?”. A brand has to decide how much of the telecom business it needs to run today, and how much it will want to run in three years.
The three rungs of the MVNO ladder
MVNO models differ by how much of the service the brand runs itself. At the bottom, a reseller runs the brand, distribution and the customer relationship. At the top, a full MVNO runs everything except the radio network. The terms are not standardised: Italy’s regulator says “ESP” (enhanced service provider), and many vendors call any MVNO without its own core “light”. This article uses the three rungs from our operating models guide; the full comparison, MVNE included, is in Full MVNO, light MVNO or MVNE.
| Model | What the brand runs | What the host MNO or an enabler runs | Typical fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reseller / Light | Brand, distribution, the customer relationship; in the light variant also care and tariff presentation | SIM management, HLR/HSS, rating, billing, interconnect | Testing demand; mobile as a loyalty add-on |
| Medium (own BSS) | All of the above plus product catalogue, charging, billing, CRM, self-care and subscriber data | Core network and radio; in some markets numbering and SIMs | Brands that need their own tariffs, bundles and customer data |
| Full MVNO | All of the above plus HLR/HSS, packet core, own numbering, interconnect and roaming agreements | Spectrum, radio access and capacity | Companies for whom connectivity is the main business |
Sky Italia moved from the first rung towards the second in September 2026. It did not need the third to control its own prices and customers.
The guide also has a five-question selector that maps a brand’s goals to one of these rungs.
What does a brand gain by moving up?
Moving up the ladder gives a brand three things.
The first is control of the product catalogue. A brand that owns its catalogue launches tariffs, bundles and promotions on its own schedule. Sky’s tariffs used to move whenever Fastweb’s did. Now Sky prices Sky Mobile Maxi at €7.90 a month and gives unlimited data to customers who also take Sky TV or Sky Wifi.
The second is ownership of the customer. Until September 2026, a Sky Mobile subscriber was legally a Fastweb subscriber. Customer data, contract and number all sat with another company.
The third is room to connect mobile with the rest of the business. A bank can tie connectivity to payments and rewards. A broadband provider can sell fixed and mobile on one bill.
Each gain comes with work attached. A brand that runs billing answers for billing accuracy, tax, reconciliation and disputes. One that runs provisioning needs reliable integrations with the host network. Taking SIM profiles and numbering adds security and compliance duties. In Pakistan, for example, a licensed MVNO must keep call records for a year and have lawful interception in place before it starts selling (ProPakistani, June 2026). More control can improve margins and speed to market. It also enlarges the operation the business has to run.
Why do brands move from reseller to MVNO?
Brands move up when mobile stops being a side product. For a retailer using SIMs as a loyalty perk, or a travel app selling eSIMs, a reseller model can stay the right answer for years. Building telecom operations would add cost without adding value.
For others, mobile grows into part of the core relationship with the customer. Sky is one case: once mobile sits in the same bundle as TV and broadband, the price and the customer record have to be Sky’s.
South Africa’s FNB Connect shows the bank version. FNB spent three years planning the service before launching it in June 2015. By the end of 2025 it had one million active SIMs, and FirstRand says about three million customers use FNB Connect and its money platform. FNB Connect earned about R300 million, up 17% on the previous year (BusinessDay, July 2026). The SIMs sit next to payments, rewards, prepaid electricity and devices. For FNB, mobile is part of the banking product. We look at this pattern in more detail in why banks launch MVNOs.
When the launch model becomes the year-three problem
The launch model becomes a problem when the business changes faster than the platform can. New projects focus, sensibly, on the first SIM: how fast it activates, what the integration costs, how much can be outsourced.
The trouble shows up later, in three recurring forms. A managed platform that suited the first tens of thousands of subscribers restricts pricing once marketing wants weekly promotions or personalised bundles. A product catalogue held in the host’s system becomes the bottleneck. And an integration built tightly around one host network blocks a second host, a new country or a renegotiated wholesale deal.
At that point, changing the model can cost almost as much as launching again. Subscribers have to be migrated. Product logic has to be rebuilt. Billing and usage history must stay available for disputes and audits, and customers keep using the service while all this happens.
Key insight. Customers do not move on their own when the model changes. Sky has to offer each existing Sky Mobile customer the option to move to the new service, because those customers belonged to Fastweb. In Pakistan, the regulator gave ONIC’s operator three months to migrate its whole base.
The deeper comparison between a turnkey platform and your own BSS is in MVNO-in-a-box vs own BSS.
What the BSS must let you change later
A platform does not need every function on day one. It needs to let the brand take more functions in-house later without starting over. Four properties decide whether the next step is an upgrade or a rebuild.
Start with the product catalogue. The brand should control it even when the host or MVNE runs everything else. If all commercial logic lives in someone else’s system, every tariff change waits for their release cycle.
Data comes next: customer, usage and charging records, with history. A migration without access to them begins as a data recovery project.
Modules should be separable. When charging, billing, CRM and provisioning talk through documented APIs, the brand can move one of them in-house and leave the rest running.
Finally, plan for more than one host. An MVNO may start on one network and later want a second host, its own IMSI ranges or another country, so the architecture should not assume the year-one wholesale contract lasts forever.
Alexander Donskoy, Avante’s Sales Director, has worked on seven BSS transformation projects since 2006, in Western and Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the CIS. “The layer operators most often want back is the product catalogue together with rating. While the host holds them, every new bundle is a change request in someone else’s queue. When an MVNO later moves to its own BSS, the software is rarely the slow part. Rebuilding tariff logic and customer history from whatever the host can export takes longer, so the format and frequency of that export belong in the host contract before launch.”
How regulation changes the choice
Regulators decide what a service is by looking at who runs billing, KYC and customer care. Pakistan shows how far that goes.
ONIC was a digital brand of PTML, the company behind Ufone, which holds the network and spectrum. In September 2026 the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered PTML to stop new ONIC sales and SIM activations (The Pakistan Connect). The PTA found that ONIC had its own packages, billing, CRM and customer care. A separate company, DTMS, handled marketing, customer acquisition, KYC, SIM logistics and customer service, and took 55% of relevant revenue for the first three years. That was enough to treat ONIC as an MVNO, and PTML’s ownership of the brand did not change the conclusion. PTML must either fold ONIC back into its own licence or have it licensed as an MVNO.
Regulation can also remove rungs from the ladder. Pakistan’s new MVNO licence, open since June 2026, costs $140,000 for 15 years and does not allow MVNOs to build their own radio or core networks. A full MVNO in the sense of our table is not available there.
So before choosing a model, map who will own subscriber data, KYC, billing, customer care, lawful interception, data localisation and business continuity. The PTA raised most of these points about ONIC. The technical design, the commercial model and the regulatory model are one decision.
Mistakes to avoid
Four mistakes come out of the cases above. Each one is cheap to avoid at launch and expensive to fix later.
| Mistake | What it looked like in the cases | What to do at launch |
|---|---|---|
| Product catalogue only in the host’s system | Sky’s tariffs tracked Fastweb’s while Fastweb held the catalogue | Keep a catalogue the brand controls, even on a managed platform |
| Customer record owned by the partner, with no migration clause | Sky’s reseller-era customers were Fastweb’s and have to opt in to move | Agree data access and a migration procedure in the host or MVNE contract |
| Outsourcing so much that the regulator sees another operator | ONIC’s revenue share and outsourced KYC were part of the PTA’s case | Map licence obligations before splitting roles with partners |
| BSS hard-wired to one host network | Not in these cases, but it blocks a second host or a new country | Keep network integrations behind documented interfaces |
Where Avante fits
Avante supplies BSS. Avante MVNx Suite is BSS/OSS for MVNOs, MVNEs and MVNAs, and it supports every rung in the table above. Avante does not act as an MVNE itself. It supplies the BSS to MVNEs and to brands that run their own.
For a brand that expects to move up, three things matter. The suite is assembled from separate products (OCS, Billing, Product Catalog, Mediation, CRM, Selfcare Portal and others) and is deployed whole or as the modules a model needs. The product catalogue and customer data stay with the brand whichever rung it starts on, and the data can live on-premises, in a private cloud or in Avante’s managed environment. And the same BSS stays underneath when a Medium MVNO later adds its own core, so moving to Full is an extension rather than a second launch. On Avante’s planning assumptions, a Medium launch takes four to six months once the host agreement and the legal framework are confirmed.
Two projects show different reasons to own the stack. VENTAmobile, a Latvian operator founded in 2015 that sells sponsored roaming, multi-IMSI, M2M and eSIM services, runs a full Avante platform covering the BSS/OSS functions an MVNO needs, with its own IT environment and integrations to third-party systems. In South Africa, Brilliantel chose Avante in April 2026 for its planned enterprise and government MVNO. Its offers go beyond standard MVNE configurations: with sponsored billing, for example, an employer pays an agreed share of an employee’s usage and the rest is billed to the employee. More on both is on our clients page.
Avante’s team also covers the work outside software: the business case, negotiations with the host operator, and network components through partners.
How to decide
Answer two questions before choosing a model. What does the brand need to control in its first 12 months? What will it need in year three if mobile works? Then check that both the platform and the host contract allow the second answer. The launch process page builds a timeline for your model and market, and MVNO vs MVNE vs MVNA explains who does what in the chain.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to move to your own BSS?
On Avante’s planning assumptions, a Medium launch on a platform already in production takes four to six months once the host agreement and the legal framework are confirmed. A Full MVNO with custom network integration typically takes about twice as long. Migrating existing customers needs its own plan on top of that.
Which MVNO type is best?
No single type is best. A reseller model suits brands that want mobile as a supporting product with little operational load. A Medium MVNO with its own BSS suits brands that need their own tariffs, bundles and customer data. A full MVNO makes sense when connectivity is the main business and the market’s licence allows it.
What is the downside of becoming an MVNO?
The brand takes on responsibilities the host used to carry: billing accuracy, tax, customer disputes, KYC, data protection and, depending on the country, lawful interception and call record retention. The further up the ladder, the more of these it owns. The wholesale price also limits how far an MVNO can compete on price.
Can an MVNO move from one model to another?
Yes. Sky Italia moved from reseller to an ESP-type MVNO in 2026. The move is easier when the product catalogue, customer data and billing history are accessible and the BSS modules can change one at a time. Existing customers usually have to be migrated, and that step needs planning from the start.
Does a full MVNO need its own core network?
Yes. That is what separates it from a Medium MVNO. A full MVNO runs core network functions such as the HLR/HSS, issues its own SIMs from its own IMSI ranges and controls routing, while the host operator provides radio access. Some regulators, including Pakistan’s under its 2026 licence, do not allow MVNOs to run their own core.
Want to map your brand to a model and a timeline? Book a 30-minute call with Alexander Donskoy.