Pepephone's mobile migration from Movistar to Yoigo.

This project (carried out between late 2017 and early 2018) was not a simple change of provider, but a full integration into Grupo MásMóvil's network Core, which allowed Pepephone to stop being a full MVNO on Movistar and operate on Yoigo's own infrastructure.

Context

Pepephone operated as a full MVNO on Movistar's network. Moving to Yoigo's core (Grupo MásMóvil) meant gaining control and network independence, but in exchange for an IMSI change that forced the replacement of the SIM across the entire subscriber base. The risk was twofold: a mass incident during the SIM swap, or a coverage outage that would drive up churn for an operator whose brand is built precisely on not causing problems.

Technical breakdown and responsibilities

As the project lead, the objective we set was to achieve the most successful operator migration possible while maintaining an extremely demanding churn rate.

Core change management: Technical oversight of the internal porting of the subscriber base from Movistar's HLR (Home Location Register) to Yoigo's. This involved an IMSI change, making the SIM card swap mandatory.

"Triple Coverage" architecture: Implementation of a network priority logic that was unique in Spain:

• Priority 1: Yoigo's own network (4G).
• Priority 2: National Roaming on Orange (primary backup).
• Priority 3: National Roaming on Movistar (critical backup).

SIM swapping logistics: Coordinating the shipment of hundreds of thousands of new SIMs to customers' homes and developing the staggered activation system (SMS/Web trigger) to avoid saturating provisioning.

Integration of Pepephone's management processes into a new internal architecture built in parallel with the migration project to unify operations across all of the group's operators.

Outcome

The subscriber base ended up running on Yoigo's own network with the triple-coverage architecture (Yoigo 4G, with Orange and Movistar roaming as backups), a priority configuration rarely seen in Spain. The mass SIM swap was executed in a staggered fashion — with SMS/web activation to avoid saturating provisioning — while preserving Pepephone's demanding churn rate, and it left in place the internal architecture on which the group later unified the operation of all its brands.