Citymesh, the Belgian communications company with roots as a WiFi integrator, has been in aggressive expansion mode in recent years. It is building private networks, drone systems, and is also one half of Belgium’s newest MNO, Digi Belgium. Adjacent to this joint venture with European budget operator Digi Communications, Citymesh is building an enterprise offering, which is due to launch this month.
Citymesh will use Digi Belgium’s infrastructure to serve the B2B market. Services will be sold by Citymesh, independent of Digi Belgium.
In this new venture, Citymesh is targeting a much broader swathe of the enterprise market than it has typically serviced. The intended customer base is small and medium-sized businesses. Citymesh plans to use some of the low-cost approach of its business partner Digi Communications and add extra services for customers, so not exactly a cookie-cutter model of the no-frills Digi model.
This week, Wireless Watch spoke with Citymesh CTO, Robin Leblon, about building an MNO and European expansion.
Citymesh has been talking up its telco ambitions for a number of years. The first win came when it formed a JV (Digi Belgium) with Digi Communications, which acquired spectrum in 2022, becoming the country’s fourth operator. Digi Belgium spent more than €114 million on licenses spanning all the main bands.
Digi Belgium has been operating as an MVNO, leasing network resources from Proximus, and will soon launch full services as an MNO. Wireless Watch spoke with the firm’s General Manager Jeroen Degadt in 2024, as the operator launched its initial consumer services.
After a restructuring in November last year, Digi Communications now holds a majority stake of 76.91% in Digi Belgium.
Since its inception in 2022, Digi Belgium has ruffled feathers in the Belgian mobile communications sector and had a marked impact on pricing.
“The Belgian telecommunications market was essentially broken,” said Leblon. “If you look at numbers from a few years ago, we were one of the most expensive countries, and we were far behind on both fiber and 5G deployment. Today, following the introduction of Digi, mobile prices for consumers are finally improving. We’ve gone from the most expensive country to now just below the European average. We hope we can push that further.”
This is evident in recent figures from national regulator BIPT. A 2025 international price study, published in December, showed that Belgium is no longer the most expensive for low and high-data subscriptions in Europe, as a result of the new market entrant.
“The results for Belgium were driven by two notable developments that had an impact on the dynamics in the mobile market. On the one hand, the arrival of the fourth operator, Digi, initially created additional competition and a marked decrease of the minimum prices for subscriptions up to 20 GB. This effect remains visible, albeit somewhat diminished,” BIPT wrote.
This is an impressive development considering that Digi Belgium only has a very small share of the market at the moment.
It seems that the threat alone of the new entrant is enough to move the dial. Digi Belgium counts 78,000 Revenue Generating Units, or subscribers, in Belgium, in its Q3 2025 earnings.
B2B ambitions
Digi Belgium is now on the cusp of launching its full range of services, which includes the aforementioned B2B unit operated by Citymesh. This is a new market for Citymesh, and it hopes to extend Digi Belgium’s disruptive approach from the B2C to the B2B market.
“Digi flipped the Belgian B2C market upside down, and we now plan to do the same in B2B,” said Leblon.
“Historically, we focused on the enterprise market and less on entrepreneurs, SOHO (small office/ home office) and SMB. But our real strength lies in delivering enterprise-grade quality, technology and most importantly service. By rolling out our own network together with Digi, we will soon be able to offer that same enterprise quality and service level to entrepreneurs, SOHO and SMB.”
Leblon emphasized that Digi Belgium’s enterprise offering would not be as stripped-back as the consumer packages. An example of this is the choice of a separate mobile core for the enterprise network, to give this unit more flexibility.
“We also retain control at the technology level. We select our vendors and parters with a long-term, future-proof vision in mind, rather than short-term margin optimization. We’re a bit lucky as well, as we don’t have to maintain any legacy networks and can focus on 4G and 5G.”
Citymesh has chosen the core for its B2B network from Nokia’s cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) product range.
“I strongly believe a separate core networking infrastructure is needed for B2B customers, as you don’t want the roadmap to be driven by the B2C movements in the market, even though it’s obviously not the most economical choice,” said Leblon.
“A core network is essentially a means to an end. It’s kind of a necessary evil. You need it, and you need it to be good, but it doesn’t really bring you value by itself. The most important aspect is that it allows you to innovate and quicky deliver the services that matter for your subscriber base.”
Digi’s European expansion
Back to Digi Communications. It is renowned for its budget mobile tariffs and has expanded aggressively across Europe with this model, most recently in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Belgium.
Unburdened by legacy operations, challengers in Europe, like Digi, can tackle the segment with a completely different approach to the incumbent operators. Digi runs at a low cost by managing operations in-house, including network management and building and this has been the case in Belgium.
“The collaboration has allowed us to build a network in a different way from our competitors,” said Leblon. “First of all, we build and operate our networks ourselves – with much less subcontractors and dependency on third parties. This gives us full control over pricing, quality and deployment timelines.”
The CTO describes this approach as stripped-back. “In the race to the bottom in telecoms, you either need to find new revenue or increase your margins in some way,” said Leblon. “Many carriers try to generate additional revenue by layering new services on top, but in Belgium, Digi is hyper-focused on building the best possible network in the most efficient way, and offering mobile services at an affordable price.”
Like Digi Communications, Citymesh also has its eye on European expansion, aiming to build private 5G networks as an integrator and eventually operate B2B MVNOs in other countries, but Leblon stressed that they will not be entering the B2C market.
Citymesh is interested in expanding to France and the Netherlands and is starting discussions with operators in those countries about operating on their networks.
“We want to copy-paste the integrator-operator model we have in Belgium. The key is to find a good partner MNO with a reliable network. By leveraging our SaaS core solution, we only need to deploy half a rack of equipment, to become a full MVNO in basically any European country.”
Citymesh is owned by the shareholders of IT firm Cegeka and counts investment firm Gimv as a shareholder, as of 2024. As a privately held company, Citymesh does not share details of its financial earnings.