21 July 2026  · Enterprise Mobility

Your travelling employees are handling connectivity themselves. That's costing you more than you think.

If you've ever managed travel for a team that moves across borders a lot, you know the challenge. Someone lands, phone goes into airplane mode, they look for airport Wi-Fi, and eventually they either buy a local SIM at a kiosk or just eat the roaming charges and hope finance doesn't ask too many questions. Multiply that by however many people you have on the road, and it's not really a "connectivity strategy", it's everyone winging it separately.

Turns out most companies are still doing exactly this. A 2026 report from Dataintelo found that fewer than 12% of Fortune 500 companies have a standardized eSIM travel programme in place. And this is happening while corporate travel is actually the fastest-growing part of the eSIM market, growing faster than leisure travel, not slower (19.2% vs. 17.2% CAGR, if you want the exact numbers, though treat any single market report with some caution, estimates in this space vary wildly from firm to firm.

So, the tech works, travel volume is up, and almost nobody's actually solved this at an organisational level. That's the gap.

What "everyone handles it themselves" actually costs you

We're not talking about a minor inconvenience here. A few things tend to go wrong when connectivity is left to each traveller:

You genuinely don't know what you're spending. Roaming rates are all over the place depending on carrier and country, and the bill shows up weeks later with no warning. We worked with a bank where hundreds of employees were travelling across 90 countries, each sorting out their own carrier arrangements, nobody had a real answer to "what are we spending on this."

People start cutting corners on security. When roaming feels expensive or unpredictable, people turn off data and jump on whatever Wi-Fi is available. That's a real risk if they're handling anything sensitive.

Nobody has visibility. If IT or finance wants to know who's connected, where, or how much data is being used, the honest answer is usually "we don't know."

What we built instead

This is basically the whole reason Telecom26 Enterprise Mobility eSIMs exists. It's not built for the single person booking a two-week holiday, it's for organisations with people constantly on the move for work. It runs on Telecom26's own network, and adds the stuff enterprises actually need on top:

Custom Plans — pricing and coverage built around how your teams actually travel, not a generic package.

Pooled eSIMs — one shared data pool across everyone, so you're not overpaying because one person barely travels and another lives on a plane.

Enterprise Security — extra security layers for organisations that can't afford connectivity to be the weak link.

Triggers & Alerts — usage alerts and API access, so someone actually has visibility instead of finding out at the end of the month.

Why now, specifically

That 12% number isn't a reason to panic, if anything, it means most of your peers haven't fixed this either. But it also means there's a real window here: get ahead of it now, and you're not scrambling to catch up later when "do you have a travel connectivity policy" becomes a standard question, the same way travel insurance already is.

For organisations with people working across field offices, missions, or just a lot of international travel, this isn't really an "if" — it's a "when."

Worth a look

Telecom26 Enterprise Mobility eSIMs are already trusted by leading multilateral development banks, for the reasons above: predictable costs, one place to manage everything, and security built for organisations that can't cut corners.

Take a look: telecom26.ch/solutions/business-travel-sim

Source: Dataintelo, "eSIM for Travel Market Research Report 2034," March 2026.