Many conversations about eSIM maturity take place at the country level. We talk about mature and emerging markets to highlight the particular differences between them, about which regulators are encouraging the technology through their policies and which seem to be putting obstacles in its way, and about the countries where the conditions are falling into place for adoption to take off. Among other things, the Holafly Global eSIM Index does exactly this, scoring and ranking fifty markets. And that is entirely valid.
But looking only at the country level obviously gives us an incomplete picture. Beneath those fifty country scores sit more than 170 operators, each measured individually. Once you move down to that layer, national averages begin to conceal some realities that are also worth keeping on the radar. In the Index, for example, the average gap between the highest and lowest-scoring operator within the same market is no less than twenty points. The gap between the highest and lowest-scoring country across the entire Index is fifty-two points. Put those two numbers side by side and the conclusion is difficult to ignore: for someone choosing a mobile service, the operator they select can matter almost as much as the country they are in.
The disparity beneath national averages
Estonia illustrates this better than any argument I could make. It ranks second globally in the Index. It is an economy where digital identity is genuinely embedded in everyday life and probably one of the first markets any of us would point to when looking for an example of a well-developed eSIM ecosystem. Telia Estonia is the ninth-highest-ranked operator in the Index, yet Tele2 Eesti ranks 147th. More striking still, Elisa, the market leader by number of customers, ranks 126th. Thirty-two points separate the top and bottom performers in a three-operator market within the world’s second-ranked country. All three operators operate under the same regulator, the same national digital identity infrastructure, and serve customers using the same devices. Yet they offer three very different answers to a simple question, how easy is it to get a mobile line up and running?
Thailand shows the same pattern from another angle. It ranks fourth in the Index and is home to True Corp, the highest-scoring operator in the entire ranking. It is also home to NT, which ranks 143rd. Spain has Orange in fourth place globally and Digi in 165th. Twenty-one of the fifty markets analyzed have an internal spread of more than twenty points. These are not a handful of unusual cases. They represent almost half of the sample.
Same rules, different execution: The chilean case
But Chile is the example I would put in front of any operator firmly convinced that market conditions explain its position. Chile ranks 33rd in the Index, has the highest device compatibility in Latin America, and requires biometric identity verification to prevent SIM-swap fraud, exactly the kind of regulatory requirement that tends to be cited when adoption fails to take off. Entel and WOM handle that requirement remotely without difficulty and rank 48th and 83rd respectively. Movistar and Claro, by contrast, do not, and rank 132nd and 142nd. The same rule applies to all four operators. Two built a remote process and two did not. It is that decision, rather than the regulation itself, that accounts for a twenty-point gap between them.
This is where the analysis becomes particularly interesting. When a market is underperforming on eSIM, the explanation is almost always structural. The devices are not there yet. The regulator makes things difficult. Customers are not asking for it. All three constraints are real, and the Index captures them with considerable precision. But they are also shared constraints because they affect every operator in that market at the same time. The fact that operators in the same country can end up twenty points apart means those shared constraints cannot fully explain the differences between them. There must therefore be other factors at work, and they are likely to be found in a set of decisions that sit squarely within the operator’s own business: whether to build remote activation or require a store visit, whether to put eSIM inside the app or bury it on a support page, whether to treat the profile as a product or merely as a provisioning detail.
The illusion of benchmarking against national averages
I would go further. Operators at the bottom of a strong market may actually be in a worse competitive position than operators leading a weak one, and they may not realize it because they are benchmarking themselves against a national narrative that flatters them. If you are Tele2 Eesti or NT, your market is routinely described as advanced. That description may be accurate at country level, but it can be deeply misleading when applied to your own service. Your customers, meanwhile, are not comparing you with the global average. They are comparing you with the operator next door that lets them activate a line in four minutes without leaving the sofa.
Closing the gap: Roadmap decisions vs. hardware cycles
There is another important point here, because it helps explain how quickly an operator can climb out of that position. If the gap is driven by commercial decisions rather than structural conditions, it can be closed relatively quickly. Nothing in Chile’s biometric requirement prevents Movistar or Claro from doing what Entel and WOM already do under the same rules. Nothing in Estonia prevents Tele2 from matching Telia. Closing a twenty-point gap in device penetration requires a replacement cycle and could take the better part of a decade. Closing a twenty-point gap in activation and digital experience requires a roadmap decision and a couple of quarters. And that depends entirely on the people making those decisions inside each operator.
That is why I believe the operator layer is the other useful half of this Index, even if the country ranking is, for now, the half that gets quoted most often. A country’s score tells us what that market is capable of. An operator’s score tells us what is being delivered within it. Those turn out to be two very different questions, and the operator layer is one we intend to pay much closer attention to going forward. If you work for one of the operators measured in the Index, the exercise worth doing is not simply to look up where your country ranks. It is to look at where you rank against the operator next door, operating under the same conditions and serving the same customers.
