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Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
41–50 of 292 posts
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#42Some random person I met dropped their phone in a river, just after arriving in a foreign country. He bought a new phone, but getting back to his phone number was not easy or possible for him (while in a foreign country). If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him. Instead he had to wait until he got home to pop in a new SIM card. I learned from this experience that maybe eSIM is a good idea a…
> If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him.
Except many carriers have you jump through hoops to activate an eSIM on a new device. Here in the comments one person has to receive a new QR over snail mail.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#43My telco requires that I receive an SMS on my eSIM to move it to new phone so... yeah.
It's amazing if the phone for whatever reason doesn't work and that then requires a long customer support call that might not work. The direct phone-to-phone transfter the devices offer is also blocked on the carrier.
Another issue I had was (travel) eSIMs failing to provision because the carrier didn't whitelist my phone brand/model. The QR code was spent, my money gone and customer support nowhere to be found.
I've never had such issues with pSIMs in decade before. It's ridiculous.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? What's wrong with Bluetooth?
Worse quality, latency, potential to lose one (or both) earbuds, having to faff with batteries and charging and cases (and charging the charging case) when I can just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears. The knotting is a small price to pay for the improved quality and convenience in every other way. What's wrong with analogue audio?
Shouldn't it be the same thing? You either have the DAC on your phone convert the digital music file to an analog signal and send it over the aux cord to the speakers in the headphones, or have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right? It's not like you're plugging your headphones into a record player.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#45It seems nobody recalls how bad it was back in the day. CDMA phones (Mostly carriers like Alltel, Verizon and sprint.) did not have sim cards until 4g/LTE. Before that to migrate phones you had to get customer support involved.
AT&T and other GSM based carriers had sim cards on their phones and it was so much nicer.
Nobody has been able to convince me that esim is not just going back in time 15+ years. We moved to sim cards for a reason.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
eSIM is specifically designed to deny user freedom. They are impossible to transfer from device to device by design, for one. Every single "transfer" has to be approved and signed off by a cellular provider in an online mode. They can deny it at will, or just neglect implementing it, and you can do nothing at all. It's pretty clear that when GSMA talks of "security", they mean "security of the business models". What…
esim.me, 9esim and "sysmocom eUICC for eSIM" are eSIMs in the SIM card form factor that you can load the SIM profiles onto and use them in any device with a SIM card slot (and of course transfer between devices). In my opinion, that's the best of both worlds.
It's good, but they're expensive as fuck for what they are.
The best option would be a software-only eSIM with full transfer support, IMO. But we don't have that, because GSMA says we can't have nice things.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#47I am quite annoyed by the people who don't see the issue with eSim because "they never had an issue" with it. It's like having one murder down your block and stating that you don't see the issue because nobody attempted to murder you so far. ESim are backed up as part of iCloud backups, had one dodgy carrier in Europe (Lyca) who never activated my eSim so I switched back to a new carrier but I had to get a transfer a…
Yeah, eSIMs are built for high trust locations. I just use Google Fi and they’re pretty decent about it all. This whole “switching a carrier” business is kind of pointless busywork I don’t do any more.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#48My wife and I recently switched from T-Mobile to Noble Mobile and it was painless with an eSim. I didn’t have to try to track down my sim slot key, I didn’t have to go to the cell store or wait for a sim card in the mail, I just followed their onboarding instructions and made the new eSim my default. It took about 5 minutes.
> I didn’t have to try to track down my sim slot key, This made me laugh.
Why? Because you can use pretty much any slim pointy object you can find?
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#49> We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card. Some people might have given it up. I personally own a Sony Xperia phone, and intend to buy another Xperia next year, which will almost certainly still have both. In fact Sony is the one manufacturer that returned to a headphone jack after having removed it for a while. It might be more expensive than the competition, but this is my voting with my wallet.
Most phones that cost less than ~300 USD still have a headphone jack and microSD slot.
I've never understood spending more than that on a phone anyway, you can't exactly use all that processing power on a phone operating system. Unfortunately some of the bad features from expensive phones have been moving down to the cheaper ones, like the destroyed screen that's missing its corners and has a hole for the camera in it for some reason.
Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
#50It seems nobody recalls how bad it was back in the day. CDMA phones (Mostly carriers like Alltel, Verizon and sprint.) did not have sim cards until 4g/LTE. Before that to migrate phones you had to get customer support involved. AT&T and other GSM based carriers had sim cards on their phones and it was so much nicer. Nobody has been able to convince me that esim is not just going back in time 15+ years. We moved to si…
I agree, although two counterpoints. One is that carriers would just lock the phones in the US anyway. Second is that eSIM is easier while traveling.