Unraveling the Airalo Ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper explores the Airalo ecosystem, a thick Mobile Network Aggregator operating across 219 countries, analyzing its infrastructure, performance, and pricing through measurements and monitoring.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive study of Airalo, revealing its unique infrastructure, decoupling of geographic and network locations, and operational characteristics.

Findings

Airalo often decouples internet gateway location from the base operator country.

Web and device measurements reveal performance variations across countries.

Pricing analysis shows diverse market strategies and cost structures.

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed myriad flavours of Mobile Network Aggregators (MNAs) which exploit the coverage footprint of a handful of base operators to provide global mobile connectivity. Under the MNA model, emerging operators reap the benefits of network softwarization and virtualization, including eSIM technology or control/data-plane separation. This paper investigates an emergent MNA type - a thick MNA - that relies on multiple (core) base operators from different economies to provision eSIM profiles, while employing gateway functions to the public internet located outside the respective base operators' home country. Specifically, our work is the first to capture the intricacies of Airalo - a thick MNA that operates in 219 countries. Unlike other MNAs that our community scrutinized, we show that Airalo often decouples the geographical location of the public internet gateway from the native country of the base operator via IPX Hub Breakout (IHBO). To map Airalo's underlying infrastructure, we ran web-based measurements that 14 volunteers performed while traveling and using an Airalo eSIM on their personal devices. We further dive into Airalo's performance by running device-based measurements (speedtest, traceroute, video streaming, etc.) in 10 countries with rooted Android devices. Finally, we examine Airalo's pricing by monitoring its marketplace.