As the sponsor of the open source app which 9esim’s apk is a rip off of, happy to answer questions about this tech in general and the different options out on the market
I remember seeing a Motorola Startac in the late 1990s. Most of the phones my colleagues and I had were from Nokia and used the mini SIM. The Startac was unusual, being a flip phone, and it tried hard to be small — tho it was ugly-small rather than cute-small with awkward bulges and protrusions. What was hilarious, tho, was that such a small phone used a full-size SIM card! When it was folded it was barely bigger than the SIM (but much thicker). Ridiculous device.
Unsure how serious you are about this, but if you ever do launch it please ping me. I am a big fan of front-lit monochrome LCDs for phones, but I’m not aware of any phones with one that can do LTE or better.
I thought so too, especially because it fits too well to be luck but I’m puzzled: it’s like the SIM in the wikipedia page would be portrait-oriented and the one in the blog landscape-oriented.
Can someone ELI5 why I should care about esims? What actual problems of actual users do they address?
My (perhaps uninformed) take was simply that physical sims were a victim of Apple’s quest to have the iphone look as much as possible like a solid seamless block of glass and aluminum with nary a button nor port to be seen. Would I actually benefit in any way from using an esim in a device with a physical sim slot?
When traveling, especially to remote locations, obtaining an eSIM before the trip can be more convenient than trying to obtain a card locally, again especially if you want a specific plan (vs whatever a local shop might stock). Some plans are only available as eSIMs, so if you want one of these being able to do it in any device is useful. Very few phones can handle more than 2 physical SIMs and swapping them is kind of annoying, many phones can store more eSIMs - how much you need that again depends on your travel and usage patterns, for me it would’ve been quite nice before free EU roaming became standard, nowadays it doesn’t come up all that much, but I also almost never leave the continent.
esims solve the problem of instantly getting the sim card from the vendor to your hands with 0 shipping costs. This is especially apparent when traveling – the international esim market for travel is only really possible with esim technology.
It also enables some cool things like the ability to instantly switch carriers – I use the usmobile mvno as my primary carrier, and they offer the ability to near-instantly switch between t-mobile, verizon, and at&t; a feat that would be quite difficult with physical sims.
It’s also just more convenient to swap out sims – instead of fiddling with a sim remover and keeping track of tiny sim cards, I just instantly switch between sims in the settings screen (at least on ios). This is helpful because triple-sim devices are not common yet :)
They eliminate some friction when switching and eWaste. SIMs are fairly cheap to make, but they are ICs and have a non-trivial cost to produce and distribute.
SIM cards (which were credit-card sized) originally existed for car phones in rental cars. If you bought a SIM, you put it in your car phone and it became your phone. It’s at least 30 years since anyone cared about doing that. SIMs continued to exist because they’d been fairly good for ensuring handsets were portable across service providers. Once handsets supported SIM locking, that benefit went away and was replaced with regulations that required phone companies to unlock handsets.
The only reason to have a SIM now is to store a fairly short key. The key is small enough that it can fit on a QR code, so having a single-use IC to hold that key is incredibly wasteful. It also encourages lock in. To switch to a different phone provider (and, often, to switch between prepay and contract) you have to buy a new physical token in a shop or have it posted to you and then do a fiddly operation to remove the old one and insert the new one. For cheap pre-pay plans, providers often don’t assume that they can recover cost of the SIM from their profits and so charge for the SIM, which further adds friction to switching and encourages lock in.
With an eSIM or iSIM, the secure storage for the key is programmable and can hold multiple SIMs. If you want to switch plans, you just scan a QR code and now you have a new SIM loaded and your phone can dynamically switch between the one in use. If you’re travelling somewhere where roaming is expensive, you can get a local SIM before you arrive and start using it immediately. Some phones support more than one at a time, so you can use your normal SIM for incoming calls / SMS but the local one for data and outgoing calls. You can do that with a dual-SIM phone, but now you need to get the local SIM (airports have vending machines with a big markup, otherwise you need to find a shop once you’ve reached a town or city), not lose your old one when you install it, and so on.
Oh, and if you lose your phone or have it stolen, your provider can give you a new eSIM instantly, without having to get a physical one posted to you. This can be really important if you’re travelling and your credit card company uses SMS to notify you of potential fraud and declines transactions if you don’t reply: if your phone is stolen, you may be unable to use your credit card. Buy a new phone and get a new eSIM QR code and you’re back.
The only reason to have a SIM now is to store a fairly short key. The key is small enough that it can fit on a QR code, so having a single-use IC to hold that key is incredibly wasteful. It also encourages lock in. To switch to a different phone provider (and, often, to switch between prepay and contract) you have to buy a new physical token in a shop or have it posted to you and then do a fiddly operation to remove the old one and insert the new one. For cheap pre-pay plans, providers often don’t assume that they can recover cost of the SIM from their profits and so charge for the SIM, which further adds friction to switching and encourages lock in.
I don’t have access to the schematics and details for anything recent so taken with a few grains of salt, but when fingerprint authentication and contactless payment started coming in the android space, the fingerprint reader, HSM store, NFC and programs on the JVM inside the SIM were all coordinating within TrustZone to sign and authenticate the transaction.
In the 90s and early 00s, there was a window where saving contacts to my SIM card was the easiest way to move them between phones. Given that my phones at that time did not (readily) connect to my PCs, and they only had the standard phone keypad, I appreciated that convenience a couple of times.
As the sponsor of the open source app which 9esim’s apk is a rip off of, happy to answer questions about this tech in general and the different options out on the market
Thank you - I’ve added a link to your project to the post, in case others read it.
What project is that?
https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/OpenEUICC
Is there a resource you can share for what’s “on the market” regarding removable eSIMs?
The options I’m aware of are:
This is because it is not, technically speaking, packaging – the original full-size SIM is the usual smartcard form factor. What the article calls the “normal” SIM form factor is the mini-SIM, which was introduced early enough that very few people ever used devices taking a full-size SIM card.
I remember seeing a Motorola Startac in the late 1990s. Most of the phones my colleagues and I had were from Nokia and used the mini SIM. The Startac was unusual, being a flip phone, and it tried hard to be small — tho it was ugly-small rather than cute-small with awkward bulges and protrusions. What was hilarious, tho, was that such a small phone used a full-size SIM card! When it was folded it was barely bigger than the SIM (but much thicker). Ridiculous device.
wow! I always thought the card was packaging. Now I know my next CrowdSupply campaign: retro 5g phone that takes full size sims
Unsure how serious you are about this, but if you ever do launch it please ping me. I am a big fan of front-lit monochrome LCDs for phones, but I’m not aware of any phones with one that can do LTE or better.
It is somewhere in between. It is not credit card sized, but it is about half the length of a credit card. I’ve added a photo to the post.
(I have an old phone with a full-sized SIM, and an even older one which pre-dated removeable SIMs :))
Huh, that is a curious one. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a snap-off for SIMs like that.
Like one of these Motorola devices used when Mercury launched One2One. It took a full (credit card) sized SIM.
https://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/motorola/motorola_m300.php
I briefly had a full sized sim card as a kid, it was a prepaid card for payphones in Australia.
I thought so too, especially because it fits too well to be luck but I’m puzzled: it’s like the SIM in the wikipedia page would be portrait-oriented and the one in the blog landscape-oriented.
Turns out I was wrong, as explained in a sibling comment. The snap-off here is not the usual size.
Can someone ELI5 why I should care about esims? What actual problems of actual users do they address?
My (perhaps uninformed) take was simply that physical sims were a victim of Apple’s quest to have the iphone look as much as possible like a solid seamless block of glass and aluminum with nary a button nor port to be seen. Would I actually benefit in any way from using an esim in a device with a physical sim slot?
When traveling, especially to remote locations, obtaining an eSIM before the trip can be more convenient than trying to obtain a card locally, again especially if you want a specific plan (vs whatever a local shop might stock). Some plans are only available as eSIMs, so if you want one of these being able to do it in any device is useful. Very few phones can handle more than 2 physical SIMs and swapping them is kind of annoying, many phones can store more eSIMs - how much you need that again depends on your travel and usage patterns, for me it would’ve been quite nice before free EU roaming became standard, nowadays it doesn’t come up all that much, but I also almost never leave the continent.
esims solve the problem of instantly getting the sim card from the vendor to your hands with 0 shipping costs. This is especially apparent when traveling – the international esim market for travel is only really possible with esim technology.
It also enables some cool things like the ability to instantly switch carriers – I use the usmobile mvno as my primary carrier, and they offer the ability to near-instantly switch between t-mobile, verizon, and at&t; a feat that would be quite difficult with physical sims.
It’s also just more convenient to swap out sims – instead of fiddling with a sim remover and keeping track of tiny sim cards, I just instantly switch between sims in the settings screen (at least on ios). This is helpful because triple-sim devices are not common yet :)
They eliminate some friction when switching and eWaste. SIMs are fairly cheap to make, but they are ICs and have a non-trivial cost to produce and distribute.
SIM cards (which were credit-card sized) originally existed for car phones in rental cars. If you bought a SIM, you put it in your car phone and it became your phone. It’s at least 30 years since anyone cared about doing that. SIMs continued to exist because they’d been fairly good for ensuring handsets were portable across service providers. Once handsets supported SIM locking, that benefit went away and was replaced with regulations that required phone companies to unlock handsets.
The only reason to have a SIM now is to store a fairly short key. The key is small enough that it can fit on a QR code, so having a single-use IC to hold that key is incredibly wasteful. It also encourages lock in. To switch to a different phone provider (and, often, to switch between prepay and contract) you have to buy a new physical token in a shop or have it posted to you and then do a fiddly operation to remove the old one and insert the new one. For cheap pre-pay plans, providers often don’t assume that they can recover cost of the SIM from their profits and so charge for the SIM, which further adds friction to switching and encourages lock in.
With an eSIM or iSIM, the secure storage for the key is programmable and can hold multiple SIMs. If you want to switch plans, you just scan a QR code and now you have a new SIM loaded and your phone can dynamically switch between the one in use. If you’re travelling somewhere where roaming is expensive, you can get a local SIM before you arrive and start using it immediately. Some phones support more than one at a time, so you can use your normal SIM for incoming calls / SMS but the local one for data and outgoing calls. You can do that with a dual-SIM phone, but now you need to get the local SIM (airports have vending machines with a big markup, otherwise you need to find a shop once you’ve reached a town or city), not lose your old one when you install it, and so on.
Oh, and if you lose your phone or have it stolen, your provider can give you a new eSIM instantly, without having to get a physical one posted to you. This can be really important if you’re travelling and your credit card company uses SMS to notify you of potential fraud and declines transactions if you don’t reply: if your phone is stolen, you may be unable to use your credit card. Buy a new phone and get a new eSIM QR code and you’re back.
I don’t have access to the schematics and details for anything recent so taken with a few grains of salt, but when fingerprint authentication and contactless payment started coming in the android space, the fingerprint reader, HSM store, NFC and programs on the JVM inside the SIM were all coordinating within TrustZone to sign and authenticate the transaction.
In the 90s and early 00s, there was a window where saving contacts to my SIM card was the easiest way to move them between phones. Given that my phones at that time did not (readily) connect to my PCs, and they only had the standard phone keypad, I appreciated that convenience a couple of times.
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