The launch nobody told us about
A few weeks ago, one of our customers mentioned, almost in passing, that a new thin MVNO had gone live in the Netherlands.
We were talking about something else. It came up as an aside, though they were clearly proud of it. One of their resellers had put its own name on a mobile service, running on a PortaBilling platform our customer was already operating.
The slightly embarrassing part: nobody at PortaOne knew the launch had happened. However, that was actually by design, and is a good problem to have. We know how many companies run PortaBilling, but we do not know how many mobile brands they have launched on top of it. Once the platform is in place, they do not need us for every new tenant. They configure the offer, onboard the brand, and move on.
Build for one, launch for many.
What the Netherlands has that Pakistan does not
The Netherlands looks easy because someone already did the hard part.
They negotiated the wholesale agreement, connected the platform to the host network, wired up number portability, and worked out how activation, provisioning, charging, and billing talk to each other.
They got the first operator through the process, which made the second one easier.
A mature MVNO market does not make the work smaller. It makes it something you can buy, because somebody has already done the hard work once and turned the result into a service.
In a market with no established MVNE, the first entrant does not get that shortcut.
A licence gets you through the door, the operating model gets you to market
Nigeria issued 46 MVNO licences in 2023 and collected more than ₦8.6 billion in fees. By August 2025, two licensees were live. One of them, Vitel Wireless, is our customer.
The licence grants you permission to operate, but it does not give you an operating company.
One licence holder in another market put it to us plainly. He had no plans to roll out a service in the short or medium term. Getting the licence, in his words, had been “strategic”, and he would be in touch if that changed. His approach is not unusual, and he is not doing anything wrong. A licence is cheap compared to everything that comes next after it, which includes building or contracting for host-network access, numbering, interconnect, identity verification, regulatory reporting, distribution, payments, and customer support. Charging and billing sit in there too, and that is where PortaBilling fits in.
Depending on your operating model, you may also need your own APN, and an integration fee to go with it, before anything moves at all.
Pakistan’s window is open, and the shelf is empty
In June 2026, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority opened a new MVNO licensing regime.
A nationwide licence now costs USD $140,000 for 15 years, and the rules allow four operating models: reseller, service provider, enhanced service provider, and full MVNO.
But that market does not currently have an established neutral wholesale aggregator or a mature local MVNE.
So the first licensees may each end up commissioning the same host-network integrations, platforms, and operating processes, separately, at roughly the same time.
We’ve watched this happen on projects that are already under way. One customer is currently working through a 170-page wholesale contract on their own, which is the only document they have from the host operator. Nothing in it describes the technical interfaces, so the integration is being planned on guesswork. It’s not the first time we have watched a team put all its effort into negotiating the deal and none into the interfaces sitting behind it.
A regulator can order a network to open, but it cannot order an integration to finish.
Whether you plan to launch as a light MVNO, a full MVNO, or eventually a multi-operator MVNO, the problem is the same. Somebody has to build the missing service before anybody else can buy it.
If you want to learn about what’s involved, we wrote up how to launch an MVNO quickly and what usually slows it down.
Do the arithmetic before you pick a brand name
One prospect told us they wanted to launch an MVNO and “be like T-Mobile.”
That’s brand ambition, but it’s not yet a business model.
Not everyone arrives that way. Plenty of businesses come to us with a clear list: the APN setup, the activation and porting flow, the billing structure, the APIs they intend to automate against, and a target date. Those are usually the ones who launch.
Either way, the arithmetic is the same. Blended mobile ARPU in Pakistan is around a dollar. A new independent brand has to cover its platform, host integration, operations, and the cost of acquiring every subscriber out of that, while competing with three host groups that already have national networks, distribution, and marketing budgets.
The numbers change if you already have customers. A bank, retailer, insurer, or an ISP can sell mobile into a relationship that already exists, instead of buying a customer base from scratch. And they change again if the platform carries more than one brand. That’s a different business from a standalone consumer brand, and we have written separately about turning the MVNO trend into an offer.
The enabler test
Launching an MVNO does not make you an MVNE.
If your platform is built around one brand, one catalogue, and one set of hard-coded processes, you have built a single-tenant MVNO. The technology might be capable of more. That is not the same as being able to sell it.
The real test is whether the next brand can be separated from the first.
With PortaBilling, an MVNE runs shared BSS and online charging while each MVNO underneath manages its own product catalogue and customer base. For a second brand to launch on that same foundation, it needs its own:
- products and prices
- customers and balances
- invoices and reporting
- users and permissions
- customer-facing identity
You also need wholesale billing between the levels, clear operational boundaries, and a repeatable way to bring the next tenant on board. Get this right and you become an enabler for other brands to leverage what you’ve already built.
When that separation is missing, the platform still works, but it stops being a product, and we’ve seen where that ends. One enabler running six brands on a billing system it had built itself, told us they had run out of patience maintaining it. What they wanted was to stop employing developers and get back to running the business.
Separation is what turns infrastructure built for one MVNO into something other MVNOs can buy.
Somebody who already made this decision
Daniel Tibor Fuchs, owner of Datora Telecom, made this choice years ago.
His explanation is short: “We don’t like end users. It’s not our thing, okay, they call too much.”
So Datora became an aggregator instead. Fuchs says they now have 21 MVNOs under them and around three million subscribers, and they outsource core networks for other MVNOs as well. They have been doing it on PortaBilling for 17 years, at a scale that kept growing as the tenants added up.
His own description of the business is close to a definition of an enabler. He says Datora runs “almost like a light MNO”, with “everything a mobile network has except the radio”.
Datora shows that the wholesale path is a real, long-established business, and someone who built one has a very clear reason for believing in it. That doesn’t mean every MVNO should follow the same path.
What you build, what you buy, and what we do not do
PortaOne provides the BSS and online charging. It’s a deliberately narrow part because we work with specialist partners for the mobile core.
You still contract for the wholesale agreement, KYC, numbering and interconnect, distribution, payments, regulatory reporting, and the programme management that holds all of it together.
We do not act as the systems integrator for the whole project, and we do not take commercial risk or work on revenue share.
That boundary is worth stating early, because building an MVNE means assembling an operating model rather than buying a single product, with different suppliers responsible for different parts of it.
The decision comes early
If you are looking at an MVNO licence in a market with no established enabler, the questions arrive sooner than most people expect.
Are you building only what your own brand needs? Or are you building a route to market that other brands can use too?
The first gives you an MVNO. The second can give you an MVNE.
If you are working through these questions now, see our published resources on launching and running an MVNO in the MVNO resource hub.
Roman Khalenkov is CCO of PortaOne. He works with service providers launching and operating MVNO and MVNE businesses, including in markets where the wholesale ecosystem is still taking shape. If you are assessing a launch in a market without an established enabler, he is happy to compare notes, including on the parts of the project that are difficult to buy.