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Those that I found, are for MFF2 UICC chips, basically just a soldered on SIM card.
And eUICC, which seemed to be the way to go, still requires that you pick one carrier to provision the settings with.
How does e.g. Apple get around this?
I get all the objections, but — eSIM is extremely convenient for traveling, when you just want data in another country. You can have many of them stored in your phone and activate them as needed if you travel a lot. You also get dual-SIM on most devices so you don't have to carry a second phone for your domestic number. I'd never replace my actual SIM with one though. I can't bring myself to trust software this much.
I've been SIM-free for a while now. It Just Works™
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TrustZone and Secure Element have been available for quite some time now. I think this problem is more because carriers/users don't want to give up control to software companies than it's about lacking hardware.
What apple calls Secure Element is a separate chip that essentially is an eSIM with NFC interface (or in other words, smart card MCU with larger memory and more IO). Apple's implementation of what TrustZone is supposed to solve is called Secure Enclave and also involves separate CPU core (inside the application SoC) that is isolated from the application cores by how the hierarchy of various buses on the chip is struc…
Security chips have also had their vulnerabilities over the years, through power injection attacks or similar, that allow cloning just like bypassing the security of TrustZone would. The attack may be harder to pull off, but nothing is unhackable.
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I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I know people who traveled for months, and they have half a dozen eSIMs on their phone. When they enter one of those countries, they just toggle the sim to active and it’s good to go. They do this all the while having a USA physical sim as well. This on iPhone btw.
Okay but how do you get local prices if there is no local eSIM? The best you can hope for is a travel SIM which may be multiple times more expensive than a local SIM.
Why is this a positive story? Downsides: -it is more cumbersome to replace phones, as you have to move identities from phone to phone and get approvals by carriers and device makers instead of just replacing the physical SIM -you can't just hand over your phone to someone else, you have to unroll yourself and enroll the other person -you don't have anonymity and privacy since is no longer possible to use a prepaid ph…
> it is more cumbersome to replace phones, as you have to move identities from phone to phone and get approvals by carriers and device makers instead of just replacing the physical SIM That really depends on the carrier. In my case, setting up a new iPhone to replace an old one means saying yes in the prompt displayed by the phone. Nothing else. This is more convenient than having to search for the SIM removal tool.…
That's the point. Now, suddenly carrier has more powers than they should. Having a standard where consumer is in charge is much more desirable than the other way around.
> This is more convenient than having to search for the SIM removal tool. Then let the manufacturer know that a SIM tray without the need of SIM removal tool is your preference.
Wonder if QC holds any iSIM related patents, that will prevent their competition from offering iSIMs.
This looks like paid Qualcomm PR, for the following reason. From the article, it looks a lot like Qualcomm trying to coopt the eSIM success now a few years old, by saying the electronics of iSIM are a custom block in their silicon, not a separate small chip. But it doesn't clarify that others (like Apple obviously) can't realize their eSIMs in their custom SOC, as far as i see. > Qualcomm says "the new iSIM is fully…
> This looks like paid Qualcomm PR, for the following reason Ars Technica does not do paid articles. They put a disclaimer to that effect on car reviews when a manufacturer pays for flight and hotel costs.
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Why are eSIMs less convenient for you? In all of the interactions I've had, eSIM works without issue and right away. Most of the times I've needed a physical SIM card I've had to wait for it to be mailed or plan a trip to a physical store, or the old one is the wrong size and I need a new one or an adapter.
I can swap sims in about 30 seconds. With eSim I need to ask my carrier for a new eSim registration code to be generated which takes 48 hours. It's insane and I have no idea why we agreed to this standard.
I swap SIMs every couple of years, so a delay of 48h is well within the scope of planning for such an event. Additionally, I happened to do an eSIM swap today and it took about an hour.
For some use cases it's more convenient than a physical card, for some use cases (or implementations) it's less convenient. That doesn't make it insane.