Juniper Research has released market research predicting that 5G subscribers will spend $10.8bn on roaming globally in 2028, rising from $4.2bn in 2025, with 2028 becoming the first year in which 5G roaming spend exceeds spend from 4G subscribers.
The study, Global mobile roaming market 2025-2029, offers an assessment of the mobile roaming market to date, including market analysis and in-depth forecasts for 61 countries. The dataset contains over 48,300 market statistics within a five-year period.
The study makes the case that telecoms operators are not yet efficient enough in roaming. Moreover, it suggests the key challenge operators face in maximising roaming revenue is an inability to efficiently identify and manage roaming connections on networks, leading to roaming revenue leakage.
Making the same basic comparisons as it did for private cellular networks a week earlier, Juniper said that despite the first commercial 5G networks launching in 2019, it will take a decade for operators to receive more revenue per annum from 5G roaming connections than 4G roaming connections. The research attributed slow deployment of 5G roaming to complex architectures and more comprehensive roaming agreements restricting the growth of 5G roaming spend.
In particular, Juniper said revenue leakage, primarily caused by inaccurate roaming settlements and fraudulent activities, will be greatly diminished by the implementation of 5G standalone roaming agreements. It noted that standalone networks use next-generation cores that enable more efficient roaming technologies to be used, such as security edge protection proxy.
On the wholesale roaming level, the study also predicted that the increased adoption of travel eSIMs will provide greater revenue opportunities for mobile operators who have partnerships with eSIM aggregators.
It added that the increasing penetration of smartphones with eSIM capabilities meant the number of users of travel eSIMs would naturally increase. This is particularly evident in countries without established roaming agreements, such as the roam like at home accord in Europe.
The analyst also observed that the rising penetration of internet of things (IoT) devices creates greater opportunities for travel eSIM usage, as travel eSIMs provide a cost-effective alternative to traditional roaming charges for these devices. This was said to be particularly applicable for use cases where there are large volumes of IoT and connected devices, as ensuring they have consistent connectivity comes at a lower price than roaming. Indeed, this, said Juniper, coupled with the easy implementation of travel eSIMs, makes them an attractive offering to these use cases.
Remarking on the research findings, author Georgia Allen said: “Despite the high investment associated with standalone technologies, we believe that the increased roaming revenue achieved from better identification of connections will outweigh this investment. In turn, we urge operators to implement 5G standalone network cores to maximise roaming revenue as competing technologies, such as travel eSIMs, become more popular with mobile subscribers.”
