Wait, what? They're unknown in the U.S? Then what in the world are they using over there?
CDMA
The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#12In Kenya, the SIM card application is very important as most Telecommunication companies have important services that they offer thorugh the application. These include Mpesa, Airtel Money, YU Cash and Orange Money among other services. The iPhone has a menu option within Settings > Phone > Sim Applications where these are displayed. I haven't seen this on other SIM cards
In Australia this is how you used to top-up prepaid phones with a credit card or check your balance. You can probably still use SIM applications to do it now but it seems to be mostly replaced by web portals.
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you go into more details? I travel a lot and use a hacked up Chinese phone since it supports dual SIM pretty well but I'd rather use an iPhone. Unfortunately I want both my US and UK numbers and contacts slightly more.
For some reason i have that NDA shit on my back, but i can show you a few options available on ebay that works well too!
I'd certainly be interested in that.
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#14They did not mention who was their SIM vendor but each SIM vendor is using their own design for the metal contacts. One could find which vendor was trying to sell them the software which they did not own for $600.
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#15Wait, what? They're unknown in the U.S? Then what in the world are they using over there?
Many people in the US are using CDMA phones that don't even have SIM cards.
This really isn't that accurate anymore. Verizon Wireless, which is the largest carrier in the US right now, uses sim cards in all of their LTE devices. Behind them is AT&T which of course is completely GSM and T-Mobile. Sprint, well... they're there.
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#16These must be pretty small applications -- don't SIM cards have under a megabyte of storage capacity?
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#17Wait, what? They're unknown in the U.S? Then what in the world are they using over there?
Apps that run directly on the SIM card are relatively unknown in the US. We (in Canada) normally download apps that run on the phone's OS, like Android or iOS apps. Running apps directly on the SIM card is very unlikely.
Most carriers like Wind sell phones with SIM apps to control your account, also there were a few banking apps done like this http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1063949/cibc-and-rogers-comp...
I played around with a TurboSim for a while too back when I was testing out a SIM card 'firewall' that would block the carrier programmed SIM from responding to OTA updates or type-0 stealth SMS and other bad things http://www.bladox.com/ then phones with wifi that didn't require a SIM came out.
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people in the US are using CDMA phones that don't even have SIM cards.
This really isn't that accurate anymore. Verizon Wireless, which is the largest carrier in the US right now, uses sim cards in all of their LTE devices. Behind them is AT&T which of course is completely GSM and T-Mobile. Sprint, well... they're there.
Sprint phones also use SIM cards too, for their newer LTE devices.
Some LTE devices have embedded SIM cards (baked inside the device so they aren't user removable, such as the Photon Q LTE).
But those are still SIM cards, all Sprint LTE devices have a SIM card of some sort.
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#19It reminds my good days programming simcards, i was the founded of a startup in Brazil that made a good use of simcard programming to store two numbers in the same simcard, around 2010 it's a cool and profitable, the thing is that i managed to insert a local imsi and an a north american imsi registered in the same card so everyone that travel abroad could be free of expensive roaming charges, them we sold the company…
in 2010??? v2/v3 sims were already popular in 2008, and its impossible to clone those (extract ki and imsi)
unless sims in brazil were that outdated/insecure at the time
Re: The secret life of SIM cards (2013)
#20In the public health space, these SIM applications on programmable SIM cards (pass-through sandwiched with parallel carrier SIM cards) are very useful for data collection: See Medic Mobile and http://vimeo.com/45532467
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ict4chw/5WKV3c6RfEU