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Why is there no opposition to this shit? SIMs were physical for a reason. As a consumer what do you get out of it? You have to go through the carriers to switch

• cmeacham98 4y ago
  Nothing you say here has any relation to eSIMs. 1. This problem can exist with real SIMs too. Back many years ago Verizon used to lock your SIM to a specific IMEI and you had to call them to change it (they might have even charged a fee for changing it, I don't remember for sure?) 2. Nothing prevents a phone company from offering an anonymized eSIM. Anonymous phone numbers are drying up, but not because of eSIMs.
  • awill 4y ago
    Verizon is a bad example as they were CDMA and always more locked down
    • cmeacham98 4y ago
      Verizon happens to be the provider I had at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if other providers did it too.
      • saghm 4y ago
        When I was on Verizon, I remember having to go into their store to get a new SIM each time I got a phone that wasn't through them. Using eSIMs after I switched to Fi was a small but noticeable quality of life improvement for me at least.
  • rubyn00bie 4y ago
    As another comment said, you’re referring to Verizon’s CDMA network. Which did not use GSM and this did not use SIM cards. Literally, no SIM cards. It wasn’t until their LTE network they supported SIM cards in any meaningful way. Their handsets were locked to their network and only worked on their network. Occasionally, an “international” phone would be sold that had CDMA + GSM so their customers could use it overseas but the SIM card slot did literally nothing here in the states since those phones wouldn’t have supported T-Mobile or AT&T’s network frequencies. And just because nothing prevents a phone company from offering them, doesn’t mean they will. Having the ability to just move a SIM card is very pro-consumer in a way I don’t think esims will ever be (unless the EU regulates it).
    • indymike 4y ago
      More recent versions of CMDA devices did support SIM cards.
  • baybal2 4y ago
• staticassertion 4y ago
  > It's like people who oppose cash payments out of the convenience of card/app payments Well, yeah, cards are radically more convenient. And this eSIM also looks like it solves real problems. People want to solve real problems. Until "my eSIM provider won't let me register for email" (or something? I'm guessing that that's what you're saying is a problem) or "I have no physical SIM to swap into another device, and for some reason I care about that" are bigger problems no one is going to optimize for that.
• axg11 4y ago
  SIMs were/are also issued by carriers? You have to go through carriers either way. You're using their network.
  • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    You got a sim and you put it in any phone you wanted. Now every time you switch a phone, you have to contact your carrier and possibly even get charged for the change. If you travel a lot, you just buy a prepaid sim card in whatever country you're in, and put it in a phone, then leave the country, take the sim out and use another sim in that country. Some new phones (notably the new iphone, us version) don't even have a sim card slot anymore.
    • selykg 4y ago
      > Now every time you switch a phone, you have to contact your carrier and possibly even get charged for the change. This depends on the carrier. I use US Mobile. In their app, there's a very simple button on each line's screen to transfer the eSim to another phone. I converted my physical sim to eSim on my iPhone XS before the iPhone 14 came out a couple weeks back. When I got my iPhone 14 I was able to transfer the sim to my new phone in about 30 seconds. The ONLY gotcha here is you do need internet access to make this work, so that is one thing to keep in mind. But it's super easy to do and I really don't see a majority of the complaints around how easy it is being legitimate. I suspect many of you haven't actually used eSims before.
      • nikau 4y ago
        Can you transfer the eSIM if the source device is broken?
        • selykg 4y ago
          Presumably that would require calling your provider to do. But depending on how your source device was broken, even with a physical sim that might be required.
• jacobr 4y ago
  It's definitely a trade-off between privacy/liberty and other benefits. The spread of standardised time and clocks had a significant negative impact on individual liberty, and people would even sabotage clocks. They failed of course, as will the opposition against the cashless society, because cash is so much worse in most aspects. If it's something you care a lot about, rather than going the way of the Luddites and opposing eSIM and electronic payments I would suggest focusing on using technology to find new solutions to the privacy/liberty problems.
• rvz 4y ago
  Yeah. They want a magnificent dystopia, where everything will be digitalized and you will be tracked, micro-chiped, no privacy, own nothing, only rented and be a happy 'user'.
  • iknowstuff 4y ago
  • olliecornelia 4y ago
    Physical SIMs are microchips.
    • systemvoltage 4y ago
      I think OP meant microchips that cannot be detached from the device. Physical SIMs can be easily disconnected and destroyed without destroying the device.
      • Nextgrid 4y ago
        Which doesn't help from a tracking point of view because the device still retains a persistent, unchangeable identifier (the IMEI) which will be broadcasted as soon as you insert a new SIM (and maybe without one even, since in certain locations SIM-less emergency calls are possible).
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
• wklauss 4y ago
  All of these things you mention are real trends, but they are not tied to eSIM. 1. eSIM standard supports transferring of eSIM profile from one phone to another. physical SIMs can be tied to specific IMEIs (and it use to be VERY common) 2. You can use eSIMS on unlocked phones. 3. Burner phones can still exist! Nothing prevents a phone company or MVNO from offering eSIMs the same way they did SIMs before (obviously local law might force you to provide ID, but this has been the case with SIMs as well in various countries)
  • gruez 4y ago
    >1. eSIM standard supports transferring of eSIM profile from one phone to another Source? The only implementation I know of is on iOS, which allows you to transfer esims between phones that are on the same icloud account. For every other phone the solution was to get a new QR code from the provider.
    • pmx 4y ago
      You simply unregister the eSim on the first phone and then scan the QR code on the new phone, it works "offline" too.
      • lxgr 4y ago
        Unfortunately, that's not true for all eSIMs I've used – some activation codes are single-use, and you have to contact the provider to issue a new one every time. Some of them even charge for that... But I agree that this is exclusively a policy problem, not a technical problem with eSIM, which clearly supports reusable profiles as well.
        • mindslight 4y ago
          I would still call that a technical problem, fundamentally. If the technical failing didn't exist, then businesses would be unable to create the user-hostile policy to decommodify the market.
• clint 4y ago
  There's no "opposition" because your entire argument is predicated on a straw man that you have invented in your own mind.
  • INTPenis 4y ago
    The need for anonymity for legal reasons is absolutely not a straw man argument. I just finished telling a woman how she should be careful on dating apps and always use an anonymous sim card, never give out her real number, or real contacts, to strangers. But my country is making this impossible now too, and the reason is drug dealers using them for burner phones of course.
    • foobiekr 4y ago
      What problems do you suppose using an anonymous sim card solves in the real world of dating?
      • samtho 4y ago
        With many mobile providers, the name on the account is directly associated with the number. Try to enter your own mobile number into Twilio’s lookup feature and see what name pops up.
      • INTPenis 4y ago
        Not just for dating, women who flee their home with a child in their arm and are put up in a secret apartment by the local ROKS org here usually still have to contact the babys father at some point. I know first hand it's one of the biggest issues in those orgs to keep their apartments hidden from anyone but the police.
    • mrweasel 4y ago
      > The need for anonymity for legal reasons is absolutely not a straw man argument. That's not really an argument against eSIMs. As you point out getting an anonymous real SIM is also impossible in many countries. What prevents anonymous SIMs (or eSIMs) are legal issues and is not related to the technical implementation. Potentially eSIMS could make the whole process of getting burners much easier, if it wasn't for the legal issues.
• AnonMO 4y ago
  If your phone can scan qr codes you can use esim its pretty easy at least in my experience. I unlocked my phone when i was traveling to Kenya grabbed an esim for a couple cents when i landed and was set up in seconds.
• wiredfool 4y ago
  ESims are quite nice, out here in the real world. You can travel to a different country, find your data is crap because reasons -- either they're not roaming well (hello edge on a cheap out of country provider), or you've travelled to Switzerland and data now costs 7.13eur/mb. (yeah, a car/Gb) So you pay for an ESIM from an MNVO, get a qr code, install, and you're good to go in 5 minutes from any network connection. Nothing physical required. And your normal number is still there for incoming calls/texts, because all the ESIM phones I've seen have at least two slots (or one + physical sim) Of course, you've got to have an unlocked phone. But you wanted that anyway.
  • bsimpson 4y ago
    It's so nice to not have to spend the first day of a trip wandering around looking for a SIM shop that's open and will sell to you with a foreign passport. Last time I was abroad, I set up an eSIM while I was waiting at baggage claim, so I had service on my multihour train connection.
    • schwartzworld 4y ago
      > It's so nice to not have to spend the first day of a trip wandering around looking for a SIM shop I went to three different countries this summer and all of them had sim cards available on your way out of the airport. In Armenia, it was in the baggage claim.
      • thekid314 4y ago
        This is sometimes true. Like in Tunisia where they give a free SIM in baggage claim. But I crossed a lot of land borders through west africa where it would be a day or two of traveling before I could find an official store that had a physical SIM. Experiences differ.
      • SpectralTheory 4y ago
        I did not notice this in Ireland, but I may have missed it. It was this easy in London though.
• ksec 4y ago
  > It's like people who oppose cash payments out of the convenience of card/app payments. Well it wasn't that long ago, 95% of HN comments were all for Digital Payment, Apple Pay, and Cashless Society. Things only changed around ~2019.
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    Well, a lot has changed on HN. I used to agree with half of the people here. Now, it is less than 5%, usually gray comments. I think it is not just HN, the society itself has devolved and going into the toilet. Or it could just be that I have changed, but that's easily litmus tested by just reading old threads which I still agree with (pre-2019). Regarding physical stuff, just the other day people love the idea of QR codes in restaurants with no opposition to the totalitarian digital state we're slowly building. Same goes with security cameras, cashless payments, parking apps, esim, covid QR codes, etc. QR codes are extensively used in China for tracking people everywhere.
    • TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    • int_19h 4y ago
      How does a QR code in a restaurant translate to a "totalitarian digital state"? It's just a machine-readable link, nothing more.
• infotogivenm 4y ago
  This comment thread = hn insanity. Putting aside your misplaced outrage here, I recommend actually reading the article. Granted it’s incredibly winding and full of the buzzword “zero trust”, but they explicitly mention adding support for physical sim cards.
  • _8j50 4y ago
    My comment was about how phone makers like apple are getting rid of physical SIMs.
  • TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Just use a script to swap "zero trust" with "big brother", and the article becomes legible!
• tomashubelbauer 4y ago
  I am not sure how common this is in the US or other countries, but in the Czech Republic (maybe in the whole EU?), the carrier is obliged by law to provide you with a special numerical code which you can then use to transfer your phone number to a new carrier without the old carrier being able to do anything about it or indeed being involved in any way at all. This completely erases the need to have a physical SIM in order to keep your phone number. I am not sure whether carriers here offer prepaid eSIMs though.
  • krzyk 4y ago
    Same in Poland. The usdye is that not all providers support esim (2 out of 4)
  • Ayesh 4y ago
    This is commonly called Number Portability. I don't think it's mandated by the EU, but every EU country I looked up supported it. In the Netherlands, for example, you can obtain a new SIM card or port number to another NL carrier. KPN uses the PUK code to verify ownership, which I think is great and has the least amount of hassle if you have written down the PUK code that was printed on the SIM package when you first bought it. The downside is that you cannot change the PUK codes.
• kornhole 4y ago
  Phone number does not equate to SIM. I use VOIP for SMS and only when really needed. I suppose this solution could work with dual esim where one could primarily use https://invisv.com/articles/pretty-good-phone-privacy.html https://invisv.com/articles/pretty-good-phone-privacy.html.
• vl 4y ago
  And this is exactly why I’m not going to buy new SIM-less iPhones. In typical Apple asshole fashion, in China you can buy an iPhone which takes two sims, in US - zero. Talk about carrier lock-in and Apple helping it.
  • MBCook 4y ago
    What carrier lock-in? My iPhone can support 8 eSims. I can have two active at a time and switch between them whenever I want.
    • vl 4y ago
      When you drop your iPhone on the floor and it shutters, how exactly are you going to get to your SMS 2FAs? The point of SIM is that you can transfer service to another handset without talking to anyone. Which is invaluable, for example, when you travel in the foreign country and your iPhone dies from water damage, albeit being advertised as “waterproof”.
      • gst 4y ago
        The same example also goes into the opposite direction: Let's assume your phone gets stolen in a foreign country: With a regular SIM card I lost my phone service for the remainder of the trip. With an eSIM I can buy another phone (that supports eSIMs) and login to the website of my provider to download a new eSIM. Problem solved.
    • dathinab 4y ago
      but it could _trivially_ support 8 eSims _and_ at least one physical SIMs for like a few cents of additional production cost and basically no cost for maintenance because that is already supported in some places anyway.
• doubleorseven 4y ago
  > I hope eveyone knows that you can't as a layman register an email address or any meaningful service you depend on without a phone number You can open a gmail account from a residential IP adress and get the phone number field as optional.
  • ronsor 4y ago
    That isn't quite true. It's really up to a(n AI) coinflip whether or not the phone number field will be mandatory.
• WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  I’ve got 20,000 devices in the field. All SIM. Can’t change providers as it would be cost prohibitive as I’d need to visit all locations. With eSIM I can just push a new configuration.
  • TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    20,000 devices on an air-gapped procedure, is a security feature. If it's easy for you, it's easier for whomever has backdoor access.
• comboy 4y ago
  I feel you, but consider this - we live in alternative reality where eSIM comes first and then somebody comes and says you need to put a black box into your phone (which is btw spinning up whole java environment) if you want to make calls. You could probably get outraged at that too.
  • easrng 4y ago
    An eSIM is the same black box, just reconfigurable and soldered on.
    • comboy 4y ago
      I mean so is CPU, but in general it's a bit harder to hide stuff in some untrusted binary than it is in hardware. In general. In this case I think we're doomed regardless. Btw, if somebody knows good technical writeup on eSIM, I'd love to read it.
      • easrng 4y ago
        eSIMs are called eUICCs in the specs iirc, that might help you find information about them.
  • kelnos 4y ago
    For many of us in the US, that was indeed the case. I had a CDMA phone on Verizon's network until 2007 when I switched to T-Mobile and got a GSM phone.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bobajeff 4y ago
  I've honestly never thought about this issue until reading it. I wonder why they couldn't make registration-free eSIMs like they have with physical SIMs. That would be a major inconvenience when traveling otherwise.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• maxboone 4y ago
  I do remember this thing called SIM-locking
• alexnewman 4y ago
  Why does this effect the existence of physical sims?
• jacooper 4y ago
  I just opened a google account without a phone number. Was it easy? Hell no, but its still possible. (Its just for search console and technical stuff, never using it for my personal data) And the Phone number trend is so annoying, and its made to force you to hand something rare and difficult to change. Want to order something from any carrier or an online shop without a phone number? Good luck
• illiac786 4y ago
  > SIMs were physical for a reason. Because eSIMs had not been invented yet? You say it like it was a conscious decision… > You can't just pick up a random unlocked phone and put a sim in it True, but you will be able pick a random unlocked eSIM-capable phone and transfer your eSIM to it via bluetooth. I believe Apple already announced this feature coming to iPhone, all other vendors will follow. No need to contact SP anymore. > I have been in situations where I changed SIM between phones multiple times a day. Can I ask what the use case is? I believe this will continue to be possible with the “transfer eSIM over bluetooth” method I mentioned above. >It's like people who oppose cash payments out of the convenience of card/app payments. totally agree on this, laziness or the continued pursuit of convenience is the end of privacy, maybe even democracy. >you can't as a layman register an email address or any meaningful service you depend on without a phone number mailbox.org, posteo.de… there’s lot of email service not requiring a SIM. They even allow you to pay cash via postal service =)