Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 292 posts

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#121

Post by abigail95 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #35
abigail95 wrote: post #17

Totally different experience. Especially when traveling for work, being able to just show up in a country, download an app, and have a working local number within minutes is fantastic. I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.

I've found this as well; totally painless to add a destination data plan just before jumping on the plane. And even switching my local plan was pretty straightforward when a promo offer came in from a competitor. That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to b…

I guess I'm lucky enough to only have had providers where it would take 0-3 hours to create a new eSIM profile. Compared to 3-7 days for a new SIM.

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#123

Post by onesociety2022 »

x0x0 wrote: post #58
walidthedream wrote: post #32

I 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…

I occasionally buy travel data, and 3 of probably 8-ish instances had me on the phone with support for at least 20 minutes (and once an hour) to make an esim work. Perhaps the problem is android. But I've never had that experience with a physical sim. :shrug:

I have used the AirAlo app to buy data-only eSIMs for so many international trips. It works well but I have only tried it on iPhones.

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#124

Post by tayo42 »

Elfener wrote: post #49
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #9

> 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 i…

Are the cameras as good?

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#125

Post by ValentineC »

coderatlarge wrote: post #54
ashray wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll post an example for the parent just in case they are honestly confused about use cases. Here is one that happened to me. I had an eSIM on my iPhone. My iPhone broke (screen became somewhat unusable, and the phone was stuck in a restarting loop). It was an older model phone so I checked the repair cost and thought I'd rather buy a new one. Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new…

this carrier approval to move esim problem is more generalized on modern “smartphones”. unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone. and a host of other authentication/authorization data is tied to the device in an opaque way. don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which…

> unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone.

You could self-host Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, or something like that.

> don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.

I think they send 2FA to all supported devices on one's Apple account?

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#126

Post by remus »

decimalenough wrote: post #116

On the other hand, international roaming has become so much cheaper now that swapping SIMs when you travel is no longer necessary. The legacy carriers still try to fuck you over, but MVNOs and dedicated travel SIMs offer amazing rates: I can get a year of roaming across 120 countries for around US$15.

I've also found this a big plus. Being able to get a data only SIM for whatever country you happen to be in within 5 mins is very convenient.

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#127

Post by ValentineC »

decimalenough wrote: post #116

On the other hand, international roaming has become so much cheaper now that swapping SIMs when you travel is no longer necessary. The legacy carriers still try to fuck you over, but MVNOs and dedicated travel SIMs offer amazing rates: I can get a year of roaming across 120 countries for around US$15.

> I can get a year of roaming across 120 countries for around US$15.

Which plan is this? That sounds pretty awesome to have handy at all times. I'm assuming it's probably just 1GB or so though.

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#129

Post by EvanAnderson »

yumraj wrote: post #107
pxx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

latency is absolute killer. then there's also the fact that splitting the output is difficult, pairing (especially multi-pairing) is finicky but the real response is "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"

Adapter causes unnecessary wear on the charging port. Recently had a phone go bad when the thunderbolt port stopped working due to the same port being used repeatedly for charging and for audio adapter. So when I updated the phone I grudgingly decided to get a BT earbud.

One of my iPhone SE's died an untimely death because of failure of the lightning port, so I'm strongly sympathetic.

I also am a hardcore 3.5mm headphone user. Wireless headphones are garbage.

I did get my mind changed on USB-C DACs by way of inductive charging. Using an USB-C DAC and still being able to inductively charge seems at least somewaht reasonable to me.

On the newest round of phones for my wife and me I've tried to make sure we're inductively charging >90% of the time.

Re: Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

#130

Post by ValentineC »

reverserdev wrote: post #70
throw-the-towel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Indeed I became aware thanks to this thread! For me it was 10 mins through my provider's app (and I was also doing it internationally)

> For me it was 10 mins through my provider's app (and I was also doing it internationally)

What verification processes did you have to go through?

If it's simple username/password, that could mean that your number could be trivially hijacked by a determined enough attacker.

Post reply on HN