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eSIM is to a certain extent harder for carriers than 5G. You need to keep in mind that carriers have near-zero actual engineering capability. They're a marketi

eSIM is to a certain extent harder for carriers than 5G. You need to keep in mind that carriers have near-zero actual engineering capability. They're a marketing & financing operation with a very small technical skeleton crew, with most of the actual network management outsourced to their equipment vendor. 5G is relatively "simple" to support - you give a ton of money to your equipment vendor, they give you new equipment to install and it's done. The vendor happily does all the work for a fee and they can do it fine because it's not their first rodeo. eSIM on the other hand ties into the account & billing management software which is custom for each carrier (and it's a "big ball of mud" of crappy Java accumulated over 2 decades). The vendor can't help here - each carrier has their own ball of mud, so there is no economies of scale possible here. 5G is completely transparent to the "big ball of mud". The differing bits are all handled by the vendor-provided equipment, the ball of mud doesn't know/care. 5G doesn't change any fundamentals - the big ball of mud can treat it as a 2G network. You've still got phone numbers, CDRs, etc. eSIM is a fundamental change though. You go from physical SIMs that must be created & registered in advance, and then linked to an account by some privileged user (CS agent or in-store employee), to "SIMs" that can be created out of thin air and registered by the user themselves. This requires new functionality in the "big ball of mud". The security profile also changes - with physical SIMs the security is provided by the privileged user who is supposed to check the legitimacy of any SIM swap/registration request. With eSIMs this is done online by the user, so there needs to be additional security checks, fraud protection, etc that the existing system (which so far was pretty low stakes as no security-critical action could be done online) suddenly needs to be hardened to support. This would be no big deal for a dedicated engineering team at any decent tech company or even startup, but these companies are as far away from "tech/startup" as you can imagine, and no competent engineer would want to work there for the terrible pay/conditions/pervasive mediocrity that's in such companies. It's the same situation as with legacy banks still not being able to catch up to the functionality & user experience offered by modern "challenger banks" despite having orders of magnitude more resources and capital.

shiroiushi 2y ago
Very interesting. However, isn't the 5G deployment a little more involved on the carrier's end? I can understand if the technical part is outsourced to an equipment vendor, but what about the site selection, and all the legal and administrative hurdles needed to actually get permission to build a new cell tower somewhere, or install equipment on an existing tower or building? Or is that just really easy for the carriers at this point because they've done lots of it? I guess it doesn't really matter from the legal/admin perspective if it's 5G or 2G. How about MVNOs and eSIMs? Is this something where MVNOs might have an easier time since they're smaller/newer companies than the big incumbents? I've only done the travel eSIM thing once, but it seemed like they were using small MVNOs rather than any big carriers when I visited North America this way.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  > what about the site selection, and all the legal and administrative hurdles needed to actually get permission to build a new cell tower somewhere It depends if they're building new towers or just upgrading existing ones. Doing a like-for-like swap can presumably be done entirely by the vendor, setting up new sites indeed needs a bit of work, so maybe whatever little technical staff they have handles that (or maybe even that is outsourced too). > How about MVNOs and eSIMs? When it comes to MVNOs it depends whether the MVNO runs (at least parts of) their own infrastructure or is just white-labelling the upstream carrier's one. In the former case they can indeed do it, but the company culture challenges still apply. You need to hire and retain good engineers, something I'm not aware of any telecom company actually prioritizing. Meaning they too will eventually end up with a ball of mud in a few years. In the latter case they're just reselling the upstream turd with a bit of polish. If the upstream ball of mud can't manage eSIMs, they can't either. > I've only done the travel eSIM thing I wouldn't recommend relying on these. You're getting bottom-of-the-barrel capacity that (even if it works) is so slow that you'd be lucky to even use up half your data cap. You are always roaming and your data is tunnelled through what feels like some dial-up modem in some shady warehouse. These are a scam.
  - edualm 2y ago
    Curious that you are saying the travel eSIMs are a scam. I've used them quite a lot around Europe and once or twice in Africa (and even locally, when I didn't have an unlimited data plan and used all of my allotted data by my carrier and it was easier to just buy an eSIM), and my experience has always been pretty good.
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      I've tried a few of these and can rarely pull more than a few megabits per second (in a location where a carrier's own SIM pulls 150+). The one time I actually needed one I could barely get even 1Mbps and it had horrible latency and packet loss. Getting a refund on the non-working product was also a chore, having to argue with CS agents that try to blame bad speed & packet loss on the wrong APN being used, while only one APN works at all (the others wouldn't give you any connection, so hard to get it wrong and still connect). Note that I am talking about these Airalo, Nomad, etc eSIMs sold online, not eSIMs sold directly by the carrier themselves (the latter would generally be as good as the carrier's own prepaid offering).

shiroiushi 2y ago

Very interesting. However, isn't the 5G deployment a little more involved on the carrier's end? I can understand if the technical part is outsourced to an equipment vendor, but what about the site selection, and all the legal and administrative hurdles needed to actually get permission to build a new cell tower somewhere, or install equipment on an existing tower or building? Or is that just really easy for the carriers at this point because they've done lots of it? I guess it doesn't really matter from the legal/admin perspective if it's 5G or 2G. How about MVNOs and eSIMs? Is this something where MVNOs might have an easier time since they're smaller/newer companies than the big incumbents? I've only done the travel eSIM thing once, but it seemed like they were using small MVNOs rather than any big carriers when I visited North America this way.

Nextgrid 2y ago
> what about the site selection, and all the legal and administrative hurdles needed to actually get permission to build a new cell tower somewhere It depends if they're building new towers or just upgrading existing ones. Doing a like-for-like swap can presumably be done entirely by the vendor, setting up new sites indeed needs a bit of work, so maybe whatever little technical staff they have handles that (or maybe even that is outsourced too). > How about MVNOs and eSIMs? When it comes to MVNOs it depends whether the MVNO runs (at least parts of) their own infrastructure or is just white-labelling the upstream carrier's one. In the former case they can indeed do it, but the company culture challenges still apply. You need to hire and retain good engineers, something I'm not aware of any telecom company actually prioritizing. Meaning they too will eventually end up with a ball of mud in a few years. In the latter case they're just reselling the upstream turd with a bit of polish. If the upstream ball of mud can't manage eSIMs, they can't either. > I've only done the travel eSIM thing I wouldn't recommend relying on these. You're getting bottom-of-the-barrel capacity that (even if it works) is so slow that you'd be lucky to even use up half your data cap. You are always roaming and your data is tunnelled through what feels like some dial-up modem in some shady warehouse. These are a scam.
- edualm 2y ago
  Curious that you are saying the travel eSIMs are a scam. I've used them quite a lot around Europe and once or twice in Africa (and even locally, when I didn't have an unlimited data plan and used all of my allotted data by my carrier and it was easier to just buy an eSIM), and my experience has always been pretty good.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    I've tried a few of these and can rarely pull more than a few megabits per second (in a location where a carrier's own SIM pulls 150+). The one time I actually needed one I could barely get even 1Mbps and it had horrible latency and packet loss. Getting a refund on the non-working product was also a chore, having to argue with CS agents that try to blame bad speed & packet loss on the wrong APN being used, while only one APN works at all (the others wouldn't give you any connection, so hard to get it wrong and still connect). Note that I am talking about these Airalo, Nomad, etc eSIMs sold online, not eSIMs sold directly by the carrier themselves (the latter would generally be as good as the carrier's own prepaid offering).