You ship a device to Brazil. It connects, it reports, it works. Nine months later it goes silent, and nothing about the hardware has changed. A local rule about how long a foreign SIM stays on a domestic network caught up with you.
This is permanent roaming, and it is one of the most common reasons a working cross border IoT deployment stops working. It rarely shows up in a proof of concept, because a proof of concept does not run long enough to trigger it.
Roaming was designed for people. A phone leaves its home country, attaches to a foreign network, and comes back within days or weeks. The commercial and regulatory model assumes the visit ends.
An IoT device does not visit. A water meter installed in Sao Paulo, a charger bolted to a wall in Ankara, a tracker fitted to a trailer that lives in Turkey, all of these attach to a foreign network on day one and stay there for the life of the asset. That is permanent roaming: a SIM from one country operating indefinitely on another country's network.
Regulators and operators treat this differently from country to country. Some ignore it. Some cap the number of consecutive days a foreign IMSI stays attached. Some require that traffic generated in the country terminates in the country. Some require a local licence for whoever provides the service.
Three motivations sit behind most restrictions.
Lawful intercept and data residency. If a device sits in a country but its traffic breaks out in Frankfurt, the local authority has no path to that traffic. Rules that force in-country breakout exist to close that gap.
Tax and licensing. Permanent roaming lets a foreign operator serve domestic customers without a domestic licence and without domestic tax exposure. Several markets have closed that route deliberately.
Network planning. A host operator carrying a large permanently attached fleet is carrying load it never planned for and prices for at roaming rates rather than wholesale rates.
Brazil, Turkey, India, China, Canada and several Gulf markets are the ones named most frequently in operator guidance, and the reasons differ in each. Brazil and Turkey lean on in-country breakout and local licensing. India applies strict rules on foreign SIMs operating domestically. China restricts foreign connectivity providers by structure rather than by roaming duration alone.
Treat any list you read, including this one, as a starting point rather than an answer. The rules move, and the enforcement moves faster than the rules. Two things matter more than memorising a list:
Traffic generated in a country terminates in that country instead of being hauled back to a central gateway. This satisfies data residency and lawful intercept requirements directly, and it shortens the path between device and application for latency-sensitive workloads.
The trade-off is operational. Local breakout means more points of presence to manage, and it splits your traffic across regional paths rather than one route you control end to end.
One SIM holds several operator identities. The SIM presents a local IMSI in markets where a foreign identity creates a problem, and a roaming IMSI everywhere else. Switching happens over the air, without a site visit.
Multi IMSI solves two problems at once: the compliance problem, and the reliability problem of depending on a single host network. It adds a layer of switching logic that needs to behave correctly when a network degrades rather than fails outright.
eUICC, defined under GSMA specifications including SGP.32 for IoT, lets you download an entirely new operator profile to a deployed SIM. Where multi IMSI switches between identities loaded at manufacture, eUICC changes the operator relationship itself after the device is in the field.
That is the strongest answer to a market that requires a domestic operator relationship. It is also the heaviest, because profile management becomes a system you own and operate for the life of the fleet.
The questions below separate a provider with a real compliance position from one that has never been asked.
The last question matters more than it looks. Without per-session visibility you have no way to prove where your traffic went, which is the evidence an auditor asks for.
IXT runs its own mobile core built for IoT rather than a platform virtualised on someone else's infrastructure. That gives direct control over routing and policy, which is what a market-by-market compliance position depends on.
One SIM covers 600+ mobile networks across 190+ countries, available as SIM, eSIM or iSIM. IXT supports local IMSI options in key markets to reduce permanent roaming risk. TheIXT CMP shows every SIM in real time: status, usage, location and session logs, against the 24 to 48 hour data delay common on other platforms. When an auditor asks which network a device attached to last March, the record is there.
Coverage and local options vary by market and by the roaming agreements in force at the time you deploy. Confirm your specific country list with us rather than assuming a global claim covers it.
There is no single threshold. Some markets define it in days of continuous attachment, others by intent, others by whether the service is offered commercially to domestic users. Assume any device that stays in one foreign country for the whole of its life falls inside the definition.
No. An eSIM is a form factor. What solves the problem is what sits behind it: a local IMSI, a local breakout, or a downloadable local operator profile. A device with an eSIM and one foreign profile has the same exposure as a plastic SIM.
In most cases the device detaches and fails to re-register. It looks identical to a hardware fault or an antenna problem from your dashboard, which is why these outages take weeks to diagnose. Session logs shorten that to minutes.
Intra-EU roaming is the least constrained environment in the world for IoT, so the compliance pressure is lower. The reliability argument for multi network access stands regardless of where you deploy.
The connectivity provider holds the operator relationships, and you hold the deployment. Both parties carry exposure. Get the provider's position in writing before you ship, and verify it with your own legal and compliance team against the transposed national legislation in each market.
Pick your markets first. Establish the rule in each one before hardware ships, not after devices go quiet. Then choose the mechanism that matches: local breakout where traffic has to stay put, multi IMSI where you need a local identity and network resilience, eUICC where a market demands a domestic operator relationship.
Ask us how it works for your deployment.
devices are deployed across multiple countries and networks
SIM-level identity is enforced at the network edge
third-party access is controlled without VPNs
audit trails are required for regulatory compliance (including NIS2)
The patterns described here reflect how these environments are secured in practice, not theoretical models.