Juniper Research Identifies Leaders in the Sponsored Roaming Market

According to its new study, Juniper Research has ranked BICS as the global leader in sponsored roaming. The company is followed by Telna and Vodafone Procure & Connect.

BICS leads the market in delivering access to Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) roaming, as well as offering comprehensive analytics and business intelligence, enabling customers to effectively monetise and optimise roaming services for their subscribers and IoT connections. Juniper Research ranked the following vendors as Established Leaders in the sponsored roaming market in 2026:

1. BICS
2. Telna
3. Vodafone Procure & Connect
4. Orange Wholesale
5. Telefónica Global Solutions

As part of the study, Juniper Research analysed and benchmarked the sponsored roaming offerings of 13 leading vendors in the sponsored roaming market. These vendors were ranked on criteria such as their support for VoLTE, 5G NSA, and IoT roaming, as well as other capabilities such as roaming analytics.

The five leading sponsored roaming vendors enable their customers to offer high-end subscriber and IoT roaming services, with strong coverage for VoLTE, 5G NSA, and IoT roaming, and extensive analytics platforms. The report identified that this strategically positions these companies to quickly serve growing sponsored roaming opportunities, such as travel eSIM providers and IoT enterprise.

However, to remain leaders, sponsored roaming vendors must be able to deliver new and flexible pricing for these opportunities. To achieve this and enable new business models to address these market opportunities, the report advises that sponsored roaming providers must integrate the GSMA’s Billing and Charging Evolution (BCE) standard. BCE is the GSMA's successor to the Transferred Account Procedure (TAP) for roaming settlement, designed specifically for wholesale roaming settlement in IoT and 5G.