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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

This is great (one plan worldwide, but in places with weak currency like India, paying in dollars might turn out to be expensive), but overall isn't the industry moving in the direction of eSIMs (no physical SIM required)?

Moreover, once OneWeb, Starlink and the like launch worldwide internet service, it might pretty much render the telecom industry as it is today irrelevant?

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I think we can expect Starlink to have similar coverage to GPS: great in the country, useless in my bedroom in a multi-story building. Also the expected receiver size for Starlink is an order of magnitude bigger than the one for a cellular network.

For phones, tracking, etc the cellular network would still be superior. Something like a car might go with both starlink and cellular because anywhere where one is weak the other is likely to be strong.

> great in the country, useless in my bedroom in a multi-story building...

I'd think it'd work a bit like cable/DSL often does in an apartment company - one receiver for the building.

Or put in on the side of the building like regular satellite dishes. But realistically any apartment building that's not in the middle of nowhere will be better served by fiber anyways. Once you have multiple customers in the same building they will quickly feel the limit of how much bandwidth you can push to a small area throught the air from 500km away.

Maybe, but there is a huge market of people that do not have an eSIM. They could use this, right now: this will allow Twilio to get a head-start in this market, rather than waiting until eSIMs reach critical mass (probably years away).

eSIM, in general, is a software functionality to change subscriptions. Embedded or pluggable or any other SIM form factor (software or physical) can have the so-called eSIM technology.

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