Belgium’s IBPT found that customers who accept whatever their operator offers at renewal, instead of checking if they still need the extra data, lose hundreds of euros a year. The Netherlands’ ACM went further and put a number on it: 79% of fixed internet contracts and 60% of mobile contracts are “dormant” – past their initial period, and costing their holders up to 250EUR a year more than a fresh contract would. France’s ARCEP found a paradox: 89.4% of mobile plans now carry no commitment at all, yet portability fell by a quarter in one year. And the UK’s Ofcom has spent a decade building a whole vocabulary around this – the “loyalty penalty” – priced at up to 1,114GBP a year per household across mobile, broadband and other services.

Four markets, one pattern: customers who don’t switch are subsidising the ones who do. Until recently, most operators could simply count on that.

Why this matters more than it looks

It is easy to file this under consumer-protection news. That would miss the point. What these four regulators are showing, together, is a structural feature of incumbent economics. Acquisition discounts need funding. Back-book customers on old tariffs provide it. This is not a pricing mistake by one operator. It is close to the operating model of scale telecom in mature markets.

That changes the picture for anyone who isn’t a scale incumbent.

First, inertia is now measured and named. It is no longer a private inefficiency operators can manage on their own schedule. Second, and more useful strategically: the very thing that has protected incumbent margins for years can now work against them.

From consumer protection to competitive weapon

MVNOs and alternative operators have usually treated churn and switching friction as a threat. The pattern above suggests a different move: treat anti-inertia as a selling point, not a cost to manage.

In practice, that means a few things.

Make leaving easy, and say so. Regulators are moving toward mandatory end-of-contract notices, best-tariff alerts and easier switching. An operator who already does this earns trust that a low price alone can’t buy. For an operator built around solving one specific problem well, visible fairness on exit is cheap to deliver and hard to fake.

Build onboarding for switchers, not just new customers. Every dormant contract flagged by ACM, every out-of-contract customer flagged by Ofcom, every non-switcher counted by ARCEP is a named prospect. The winners won’t be the cheapest. They’ll be the ones who make switching itself painless: number portability handled end to end, no penalty to navigate, one clear page instead of a forty-page tariff sheet.

Compete on the metric regulators are watching. If the direction of travel is mandatory comparison and proactive notification, an operator built on transparency from day one is compliant by design. That’s a story worth telling.

From best practice to hard rule

The four regulators are not at the same stage, and that gap is useful. Belgium and the Netherlands are in guidance mode: publishing data, naming the bias, encouraging better information, with enforcement building slowly. The UK has already moved to binding rules: mandatory notifications, a ban on inflation-linked price rises since January 2025, and a new Consumer Hub pushing switching data straight to consumers. France sits in between, with no mandate yet but a regulator visibly worried about falling portability.

Read together, this looks less like four separate policies and more like a staggered rollout of the same expectation across Europe. What Belgium and the Netherlands are doing today looks like where the UK stood a few years back. Operators who wait for their own regulator to catch up will end up building under pressure. Operators who build now are simply early.

The bottom line

The “loyalty penalty” that regulators frame as a consumer problem is, from an operator’s chair, a market with a price tag already attached in every country that has bothered to measure it. For an MVNO or a niche alternative operator, that’s not background noise. It’s a target list, a story to tell, and a hedge against regulation that’s coming either way.

Sources & reference points

• IBPT/BIPT :” La passivité des utilisateurs de téléphonie mobile peut leur coûter des centaines d’euros: www.ibpt.be
• ARCEP :” Observatoire des marchés des communications électroniques, T4 2025 (portability and no-commitment plan data): www.arcep.fr
• ACM (Netherlands) :” ACM: telecomaanbieders moeten consumenten duidelijker en transparanter voorlichten over vast internet: www.acm.nl
• ACM (Netherlands) :” Marktbeschouwing telecommarkt 2024 (dormant contract data : 79% fixed, 60% mobile): www.acm.nl
• Ofcom (UK) :” Consumer Hub launch and switching/money-saving guidance (2026): www.ofcom.org.uk
• Smart Data Council / UK Government : loyalty penalty estimate across mobile, broadband and mortgages : reporting via techradar.com
• Ofcom :” Ban on inflation-linked mid-contract price rises, effective January 2025: www.ofcom.org.uk

The post The Loyalty Penalty Isn’t a UK Problem — It’s a European Business Model appeared first on AskGreg.

Something interesting happened in Belgium last week. Wout van Aert — winner of Paris-Roubaix, one of the most recognisable names in professional cycling — launched his own mobile offer. Not as a brand ambassador. As an operator.

WvA Mobile runs on Telenet‘s network and offers two plans: a 20 GB formula at €13/month, with a 2 GB data bonus every time van Aert wins a race, and an unlimited plan at €35 that includes exclusive behind-the-scenes content and virtual cycling experiences on platforms like Zwift or Rouvy.

The pricing is competitive, but price is not the story. Van Aert himself made this clear in an interview with Het Nieuwsblad:

That sentence deserves attention. Because it captures something that is fundamentally changing the MVNO market — and the way brands think about mobile connectivity.

The SIM card as a loyalty instrument

For most of the past two decades, mobile subscriptions were sold like utilities. The differentiator was price, coverage, or data allowance. The relationship between operator and subscriber was essentially transactional.

What a new generation of community MVNOs is doing is different. They are using the mobile subscription not as the product, but as the access layer to something else — a shared identity, an experience, a community that subscribers want to be part of.

This is not a marginal phenomenon. Football clubs in Brazil have been running their own MVNOs since 2019, starting with Cruzeiro Celular, quickly followed by Fluminense, Gremio, Bahia, and Vasco da Gama. The logic there is direct: football fans already communicate intensely around the sport. An MVNO plugs into that existing behaviour rather than trying to create a new one.

In Italy, AC Milan launched Connect4 — plans named after iconic chapters in the club’s history, integrated into their broader digital fan ecosystem. In Spain, Real Betis Balompié launched its MVNO as early as 2017, in partnership with Más Móvil.

In the US, Ryan Reynolds’ minority stake in Mint Mobile turned into a $1.35 billion T-Mobile acquisition. The SmartLess podcast trio launched their own MVNO built around their audience. Roccstar Wireless built its offer around music artists and their fan communities. And beyond the celebrities, GSMA Intelligence counts around 2,138 MVNOs globally — a growing share of which are affinity or community-based.

The pattern is consistent across markets and verticals: the subscription is the membership. The connectivity is the commodity.

eSIM made this possible at scale

What has changed structurally is the cost and complexity of launching a mobile offer.

Cloud-native core networks, eSIM provisioning, and MVNE platforms have compressed what used to require 12–18 months and significant capital into a matter of weeks. The technical barrier to becoming an MVNO — or to white-labelling one — has largely disappeared.

This matters because it decouples the connectivity layer from the brand layer. A cycling brand, a podcast, a professional association, a regional retailer, or an ethnic community organisation can now put its name on a mobile offer without building or owning any network infrastructure. The eSIM removes the last physical friction: no SIM card to distribute, no retail presence required, instant provisioning from an app.

In this environment, mobile connectivity has effectively become a commoditised loyalty tool. The question is no longer can we launch a mobile offer? It is does our community have enough coherence and trust to make one meaningful?

The economics are more compelling than they look

Community MVNOs benefit from a structural advantage that traditional operators cannot easily replicate.

When the audience already exists and already trusts the brand, customer acquisition costs drop dramatically. Research suggests influencer or community-led MVNOs can achieve acquisition costs up to 70% lower than traditional carriers. That changes the unit economics significantly — lower ARPU models become sustainable when you are not spending heavily to acquire each subscriber.

Churn also behaves differently. A subscriber who chose WvA Mobile because they are a van Aert fan is not going to leave for a competitor offering €1/month less. The switching cost is not financial — it is relational. That is a fundamentally different retention dynamic than the one facing a generalist discount MVNO.

Lebara built an entire European business on exactly this principle — serving international communities with multilingual support and low-cost international calling. The community was the product; connectivity was the vehicle. Lebara grew revenue 5x between 2022 and 2024 through smart repositioning around this same logic.

What this means for MVNO strategy

At MVNO World Amsterdam 2026, the message from operators and experts was consistent: the MVNO market is not contracting — it is bifurcating. Generalist operators competing on price against mobile network operators are under serious pressure. Operators with a genuine niche — a community, a sector, a clearly identified user need — continue to grow.

WvA Mobile is the consumer-facing illustration of this. But the same logic applies across B2B and vertical markets. Enterprise-focused MVNOs, ethnic community operators, student-oriented brands, professional sector operators: the models that have proven durable all share one characteristic. They give subscribers a reason to stay that has nothing to do with the monthly price.

The early generation of MVNOs — discount brands entering markets with a cheaper version of what the incumbent already offered — demonstrated that price alone is not a sustainable differentiator. The community MVNO generation is demonstrating something more durable: shared identity creates stickiness that price can never buy

The practical implication

For any organisation considering a mobile offer — whether as a standalone MVNO, a white-label product, or a connectivity bundle — the strategic question is not technical. It is not about network selection, wholesale pricing, or regulatory compliance, even though all of those need to be solved correctly.

The real question is: does your audience have a reason to care about your name on their phone?

If yes — and if the content, experience, or benefit layer is genuinely good, as van Aert himself insists it must be — the mobile subscription stops being a cost line in a competitive market and becomes an asset in a loyalty programme.

That is a different business. And it requires thinking about mobile strategy differently from the start.

If you are exploring a mobile project in the Benelux, France, or the UK and want to discuss the approach, I am happy to connect. Book a call — askgreg.eu

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