By: Miguel Carames

For decades, progress in the mobile industry was measured by coverage and capacity. The objective was clear: build, maintain, and monetize infrastructure that connected more people, in more places, with better performance. That mission has largely been achieved. According to the 2025 GSMA State of Mobile Connectivity report, nearly 96 percent of the world’s population now lives within coverage of a mobile broadband network. Connectivity is no longer a differentiator. It is an expectation.

What has changed is the environment in which networks operate. Connectivity is now everywhere, but it is also constantly evolving. Subscribers move across borders, devices connect autonomously, and traffic patterns shift continuously in response to travel, events, and behavior that operators do not always control. Expectations for service quality remain high, regardless of location, network, or circumstance. This is pervasive connectivity in practice. And it raises a more complex operational question: how do you run a network that is always changing?What has changed is the environment in which networks operate. Connectivity is now everywhere, but it is also constantly evolving.Subscribers move across borders, devices connect autonomously, and traffic patterns shift continuously in response to travel, events, and behavior that operators do not always control. Expectations for service quality remain high, regardless of location, net

When Connectivity Becomes the Default

Pervasive connectivity extends far beyond traditional public mobile networks. Today’s reality includes roaming subscribers, IoT deployments, satellite links, private wireless networks, and dense public venues where thousands of users connect simultaneously. These scenarios often coexist on shared infrastructure and control systems, increasing operational complexity.

Roaming illustrates this shift clearly. It is no longer an edge case. Industry forecasts indicate that global roaming data usage will more than double by the end of the decade, driven by 5G adoption, increased international travel, and the rise of eSIM-based connectivity. As roaming volumes grow, service performance increasingly depends on coordination across multiple operators, platforms, and regions, often spanning continents rather than a single network domain.

Large public events create similar challenges. Global sporting events and international gatherings concentrate hundreds of thousands of users, media organizations, and connected devices in confined areas for extended periods. These environments generate intense, short-lived traffic surges, often combined with high roaming activity. The resulting strain spans radio access, signaling, interconnect capacity, and end-to-end service assurance, all at once.

As these scenarios become more common, traffic patterns grow less predictable, dependencies multiply, and the margin for error narrows. Maintaining service quality now requires operations that can adapt in real time as conditions change.

Roaming Spikes Expose Operational Limits

Sudden increases in roaming traffic can dramatically expose these challenges. Seasonal travel, global events, or unexpected disruptions can rapidly alter network behavior. Traffic shifts across borders, signaling volumes spike, and end-to-end performance becomes dependent on external partners.

Following the collapse of international travel in 2020 during the COVID lockdowns, global passenger volumes have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, with operators reporting significant year-over-year increases in roaming traffic. Many have seen inbound roaming grow by more than 20 percent in a single year.

In these moments, seemingly small issues can escalate quickly. A signaling bottleneck, misaligned policy, or capacity constraint can cascade across services and locations. Customer experience degrades, often before operations teams fully understand what is happening.

The problem is not a lack of data. It is fragmentation. Data arrives from multiple sources, at different speeds, and without sufficient context. Traditional tools highlight symptoms rather than establish the root cause. By the time issues are identified and addressed, subscribers have already noticed, and increasingly, they have already switched to alternative connectivity options.

Roaming spikes do not create new weaknesses. They expose existing ones.

Why Traditional Operations Fall Short

Many operational models were designed for legacy networks that changed relatively slowly. Monitoring focused on isolated domains, thresholds were based on historical norms, and troubleshooting assumed there would be ample time to investigate and