By Randy Van Buren, Technical Business Consultant at Motive
Churn has long been viewed as a downstream problem. Price sensitivity, competitive switching, and declining satisfaction have traditionally been the ‘villains’. Yet the industry is beginning to confront a more uncomfortable reality that a significant share of customer loss originates far earlier in the journey – at the moment a device first attempts to connect.
In an era defined by eSIM, SGP.32, companion devices, and software-led activation, onboarding has become a structural fault line. When initial connectivity setup breaks, churn follows. Not loudly, not visibly, but steadily. And because these failures occur before a subscriber fully engages with the network, they are rarely measured accurately by CSPs.
Emerging is a simple truth: success of the digital-first connectivity depends on a clean, predictable onboarding experience. When that experience falters, whether through entitlement gaps, inconsistent device behaviour, subscriber errors, or fragmented activation paths, customers quietly walk away. The cost is real but the early warning signals are faint.
The shifting shape of connectivity
The growing diversity of devices has fundamentally altered how networks behave at the point of activation. Smartphones, watches, tablets, embedded IoT modules, and industrial sensors each now carry their own onboarding process, entitlement logic, and expected behaviours.
The move towards SGP.32 amplifies this. Instead of a single, linear path to activation, operators must support multiple provisioning routes: in-band, indirect, out-of-band, and device-initiated flows that vary by OEM and model. GSMA standards define the framework, but the real-world implementation is where friction creeps in. A single operator can easily support more than 100,000 device profiles across its footprint. Fragmentation is no longer an edge case; it is today’s situational environment.
How onboarding failures turn into silent churn
The reason onboarding failures are so damaging is that they rarely appear to be failures. A subscriber who cannot activate a new device often does one of three things:
- Returns the product
- Switches to a competitor
- Abandons the service they intended to use
None of these outcomes generates a clean connection story. They appear as logistics fallouts, stalled activations or dormant lines, not as churn alerts. Yet they are churn – and because entitlement gaps or provisioning errors often sit behind these outcomes, the problem is both structural and preventable.
Whether it’s wearables that fail to pair, IoT modules that never receive their first profile, or smartphones that activate voice but not services such as RCS, VoLTE or 5G, each failed step erodes trust and increases the likelihood that the customer exits the journey altogether.
Why has this problem become more visible in 2025?
The telco industry has reached a point where activation expectations have outpaced the underlying infrastructure. Consumers expect devices to “just work” and enterprises expect fleets to come online instantly. Vendors must therefore be agile and operators are expected to match these requirements.
At the same time, entitlement has grown into a far more critical control point. End users encounter numerous entitlement-related scenarios in their daily lives, even in something as simple as transferring an eSIM from an old smartwatch to a new one. Ideally, this process should be effortless: a single click to deactivate the old cellular-enabled watch and activate the replacement. The operator should manage device alignment, account settings, and eSIM profile transfer seamlessly without phone calls, complex websites, or one-time passwords.
The same principle applies to automotive connectivity. Today, nearly every vehicle is equipped with cellular internet for infotainment, navigation, software updates, and data collection. Yet onboarding can be cumbersome, especially with satellite-based systems. With AiD.02 specifications, this process becomes as simple as pairing a smartphone with the car and enabling eSIM profile activation through a single click in the car brand’s app.
This proves an important point: such simplicity is only possible through entitlement servers, which ensures a frictionless experience for the customer. Modern services rely on it as the gatekeeper for capability enablement. When entitlement is delayed, missing or misaligned, the experience collapses, even when the network itself is functioning perfectly. This gap between expectations and reality is now a measurable source of churn across consumer and enterprise segments.
The operational root of the problem
To understand why onboarding failures persist, it helps to look at the architecture beneath them. The activation journey typically touches:
- OSS/BSS systems
- SM-DP+ and SM-DS infrastructure
- Entitlement servers
- Device management
- Device-side clients
- OEM-specific integration points
Every layer must align for activation to complete cleanly. A mismatch in any one of them can result in incomplete onboarding, without any visible error to the customer for what to do next. The problem isn’t that operators lack standards. It’s that the standards leave room for interpretation, and vendors interpret differently and gap assumptions. The industry has gained flexibility, but largely at the cost of consistency.
First-activation success as the new competitive metric
What differentiates a resilient onboarding strategy from a failing one is not the volume of devices supported, but the predictability of the onboarding experience across them. Here, a new KPI is emerging: first-activation success.
Operators closely monitoring this metric are finding that improvements correlate directly with lower early-life churn and fewer call-centre escalations. A clean first activation also increases digital self-service adoption, reduces downstream provisioning errors, and stabilizes network perception. This metric is becoming as important as ARPU or NPS because it captures a moment that determines whether the customer relationship ever truly begins.
What operators can do differently
The shift underway in the industry is less about technology and more about architecture and discipline. Several priorities are taking shape:
- Streamline orchestration across onboarding and entitlement: Activation and entitlement can no longer be managed as parallel tracks. They must be orchestrated as a single lifecycle event to reduce failure points and improve predictability.
- Reduce dependency on bespoke OEM behaviour: As more devices rely on their own logic for entitlement or profile download, operators are prioritizing approaches that normalize behaviour across device classes.
- Strengthen out-of-band resilience: Indirect and out-of-band profile download paths provide stability where traditional flows are unreliable, especially for IoT, low-power modules and devices that cannot reliably complete in-band activation.
- Build certification and interoperability discipline: Rather than treating certification as a one-off exercise, operators are moving towards continuous device-level validation. This reduces the risk of entitlement drift as OEM firmware evolves.
- Make onboarding part of the customer value story: Operators who treat first-activation success as a differentiator and not a back-office process are creating clearer paths to loyalty and higher engagement.
A structural shift in customer expectations
The telco industry has spent the last decade optimising retention at the mid or late stage of the customer lifecycle. In a digital-first environment, that balance is shifting and the moment of activation is becoming the decisive point in customer loyalty. When onboarding works, everything downstream falls into place. When it fails, loyalty never forms, regardless of network quality or pricing.
The industry has reached a turning point. As devices diversify and entitlement becomes the backbone of service delivery setup, the operators who succeed will be those who eliminate resistive forces at the very beginning of the journey. Onboarding is not the first step in the lifecycle; it is the elemental foundation of it.
Image courtesy of Schaferle on Pixabay
