SIM Cards Are Going Away. Why That’s a Good Thing | Hacker News Reader

SIM Cards Are Going Away. Why That’s a Good Thing

wsj.com

24 pointsbookofjoe40 comments

Almost anything I read that's titled as "X is being removed, and why that's a Good Thing" feels like propaganda. It's as though the article is written to convince me that it's a good thing, rather then to inform me about these new options that I would actually want.

>“The vision is, you can get a phone from anyone, and as you’re activating the device, you pick your service operator and off you go,”

But you will need to already have a phone subscription at that point. All that's being made "easier" is that now I'm not moving a physical chip from one device to the other, but instead I'm using a UI to switch service providers. This UI is almost guaranteed to offer a terrible user experience.

I'd love to be wrong, but I simply don't believe in the ability of these companies to offer a well-designed UX. My cynicism tells me that the move is entirely made to control your phone more.

eSIM experience with my European providers:

* First ones eSim generator system fails with "something went wrong" after deactivating the previous SIM. Leaving me without ability to call or message someone for the whole weekend until their support comes back on.

* Second one wants me to come physically to their office during working hours to move eSIM to another phone. The closest one is currently 400+ km away.

* The third one requires a phone call to reactivate a new phone and will throttle those requests to a few per year. They don't care if you commonly use more than one phone.

In general, the experience is outright abusive to users in comparison to swapping a simple tiny chip card.

My experience included the profile mysteriously disappearing from my phone and then having to wait two weeks for a new one to arrive over snail mail, because the provider "could not verify my identity". I called from the landline that was ran by said provider.

Can't you have multiple eSims active on your phone though? For example with the latest iPhones you can have two eSims active or one eSIM and one physical nano SIM.[1] If that was the case couldn't you activate the new SIM without deactivating the previous eSIM?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044

You can have multiple eSIM profiles downloaded, but very few phones support having multiple eSIM profiles active at the same time. That would require having two eSIM chips either internally or externally. Google's working on Multiple Enabled Profiles (MEP) for Android 13, which would make that possible. Not sure what approach Apple's already using for its iPhones.

Carriers don't allow multiple active SIMs without special exception (e.g. paying additional subscription).

Not sure how your solution factors into the fact that each subscriber number is only allowed to have one active SIM on the side of a carrier.

I may have misunderstood your use case. I was thinking of the use case of traveling where you would buy a local SIM where it's actually two separate accounts. In that case you can just switch the profile. You can have a work number and personal number or your home carrier and a local carrier if you are traveling. See:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044

No, the use-case is moving existing number to a new phone because the current one was replaced, fell into the toilet, broke, died or just wasn't the right fashionable color of the day.

On the most recent iOS releases moving a eSIM is done yourself and is just a couple of button clicks.

Unfortunately this does not work automatically - it requires carrier side support. It will hopefully be widespread one day, but it may be years still.

It’ll be closer than you think. Large carriers in the US don’t expect to be using physical SIMs very shortly.

That may very well be true - but they won't go to great (or any, really) lengths to make users' lives easier unless they see a competitive advantage in doing so, or are forced by (threat of) regulation.

> That may very well be true - but they won't go to great (or any, really) lengths to make users' lives easier unless they see a competitive advantage in doing so, or are forced by (threat of) regulation.

And that may take awhile. IIRC, it took decades of user-hostile suckage for one underdog carrier to try to compete on customer experience (T-Mobile). IIRC, they've since merged with the other underdog (Sprint), so I expect things to revert to the mean (user-hostile suckage).

Not on any of those carriers.

I feel like the whole "X is going away, here's why it's good" thing is just some kind of template journalists use for articles where they know there's going to be large amounts of outrage or "why?!" felt by their readers. Definitely not being used to comfort the reader.

More cynical viewpoints I've seen is that articles are being written like this to "brainwash" people into agreeing with taking their rights away or to convince people something horrible isn't happening behind the scenes and to 'stay calm'.

I don't know - every time I read a headline like that I feel like clicking on it to see how horrible a justification a journalist has to say that inflation/supply chain problems/removing physical SIMs/etc. is good and we should like it.

Maybe that's all they need to get the pittance of ad-revenue.

>"I feel like the whole "X is going away, here's why it's good" thing is just some kind of template journalists use for articles where they know there's going to be large amounts of outrage or "why?!" felt by their readers."

Agreed and that template and content is often provided to them verbatim by the corporation or interest group that sent them the press release.

> Almost anything I read that's titled as "X is being removed, and why that's a Good Thing" feels like propaganda. It's as though the article is written to convince me that it's a good thing, rather then to inform me about these new options that I would actually want.

Exactly. If it was actually a good thing, they probably wouldn't have to tell you it was. It would be obvious and everyone would be happy.

IMHO, most people are happy with improvements and will happily accept them. However many "improvements" are actually regressions or have significant regressive component. For instance: "Rejoice! We replaced your outdated legacy system with a re-engineered system that doesn't work and has half the features!" or "Rejoice! We've shifted some burden off of us and onto you!"

SIM cards have been amazingly painless for over 2 decades.

In over 2 decades SIM cards were never as painful as eSIMs are at their least painful.

In many countries govts have added KYC rules for getting a phone, etc., but to illustrate how excellent SIM cards were, it used to be that in most non CDMA dominant countries, you could walk out into the airport, put a few dollars in a vending machine, and get a SIM card that you could slip into your phone and have a local phone number immediately.

So, now if I let my phone fall and it cracks so that it doesn't work anymore[1] I can get an older one and move the physical SIM to it.

What happens with an e-sim?

I am stuck until I can (how?) contact the carrier or go to a shop where - maybe - they can transfer the e-sim to a new phone?

[1] or it fails for any other reason[2]

[2] and this usually happens on saturday, sunday or any other time when shops are closed

If you're lucky your carrier has a self-service portal/app that allows you to get a new e-sim, otherwise you're out of luck. On iOS devices your esim can be transferred between devices on the same icloud account, but there might be some deauthorization step that can't be done if your phone is smashed.

Yep, so it doesn't apply in practice:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210655

> 4.Tap OK on the alert that says you must approve the transfer on your previous iPhone.

eSIM has one and only one user-friendly use-case: ahead of traveling abroad, to buy a local cell subscription without hassle of having to show up to a shop, or wait for mail-in.

Ditching physical SIMs altogether, on the other hand, is nothing other than giving free hand to your carrier to screw you over whenever you change phones.

congrats, you just realized what the majority of tech "improvements" from the last few years really were.

It was about making it easier for companies and gaining more control, not about the consumer.

The tech world will only get worse, soon it seems like we can only choose to be completely locked in or completely locked out.

I fear anonymity is going to no longer be realistic in any sense soon.

> eSIM has one and only one user-friendly use-case: ahead of traveling abroad, to buy a local cell subscription without hassle of having to show up to a shop, or wait for mail-in.

And that's a pretty marginal one at that. When I've gotten SIMs for traveling, it was either <20 min at little shop (where I paid cash), or something I had mailed to me ahead of time which I swapped in the airport.

Would this tie up your phone and network?

Will it be a pain once in 3 years when I change my phone?

Because for my carrier switching from the physical sim to an e-sim isn't straightforward. I'm wondering how switching e-sims across phones might be.

> ESIMs even let you have two phone numbers on your phone at the same time

Hasn't dual-sim phones been a thing since forever? (At least in Android devices).

Also, at the moment it seems to be the only way to get two carriers going on iPhone (one e-sim and one physical sim / multiple e-sims?).

> But when you want to change phones or switch service providers, SIMs can be cumbersome. Anyone who’s hunted for a tool to open the SIM tray (a skinny paper clip, for instance) knows what a pain that can be.

That makes it sound more difficult that it actually is. You only just have to push a pin through a hole.

If you're worried, buy a whole stack of those push-pins from Amazon. It's cheap.

In the UK for the networks that support eSim, to switch provider you only need to send 2 SMS's, the eSim will then be downloaded to your phone. After a few hours it's ready to go. You keep the same phone number (if you want).

This article from uSwich explains the advantages better than the article:

https://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/guides/what-are-esims-what-d...

A few hours? I can switch a real SIM in less than a minute

If you already have a preactivated new SIM card on hand, sure.

Its the activation process that can take a while, not downloading the eSIM (for what its worth, my most recent SIM / eSIM activations were comparable and took only a few minutes).

No way, delivery take way more than a minute.

That sounds like it makes SIM-swapping even easier.

Maybe it is but maybe not.

With physical SIM mailing to a physical there is at least some kind of verification to ensure that you are the one who owns it.

With digital only there is more chance of fraud. And I don't even mean it when the phone number is used to confirm identity for a bank and other institutions. That can be dealt with. The fact of someone stealing your number is enough to cause a lot of damage in some cases.

If the WSJ says that something new is a good thing, brace yourselves.

Since this is a US dominant site, an important point to realize is that Americans have never had a real SIM card experience like the rest of the world has.

1) Until LTE, the US had 50% CDMA and 50% GSM networks, with the former not even supporting SIM cards. 2) The US has always had a miserable carrier locked cell phone experience, unlike most of the RoW where buying unlocked phones was the norm.

The combination of the above meant that Americans have never experienced the brilliance of being able to switch SIM cards easily (or have multiple SIM cards), whether to keep different phone numbers/accounts, travel abroad, use a temporary phone, have phones lying around for visitors to use, keeping backup phones, etc.

Also, SIM cards made hacking around with cell phones super easy. MS had an embedded Windows OS that worked perfectly with SIM card readers that made it possible to do all sorts of cool stuff with SIM cards (I'm sure there were Linux equivalents but I wasn't as into Linux at the time).

>ESIMs aim to solve those issues. While they still require a chip inside the phone,

I still see this a lot in articles, but it's not true. It doesn't have to be built into the phone. There are even SIM card-sized products [1] that have an eUICC conforming to the GSMA's consumer eSIM specification. Basically bringing eSIMs to any (Android) phone with a traditional SIM card slot. It's actually quite clever.

[1] https://blog.esper.io/android-dessert-bites-24-esim-me-12481...

(Disclaimer: I wrote the article linked above).

https://archive.ph/WG2Hd

I have the feeling most replies are US centric, assuming sticking with your carrier forever and travelling abroad max once a year.

If you are based in Europe but not the EU, thus not covered by the common telecommunication roaming laws, the 'couple of seconds of swapping tiny SIM cards' become a complete nuisance.

Locally I already use two carriers, one prepaid with my phone nr that is barely used and a data only (unlimited) plan for <100USD/yr. Crossing the border always require me to juggle three SIMs and not to lose any of them in the process. Just last week I missed my tram at the airport because this process.

I also already experienced two SIMs with technical issues needing replacement... this is a technology that should have been abolished / disincentivised by law years ago.

I understand your criticism concerning eSIM UX, these issues are however not due to the underlying technology but purely corporate choices.

The future is obviously getting rid of completely unnecessary SIM slots and the faster we iron out the toothing issues the better.

One of my major buying criteria for my next phone is eSIM support, currently ruling out XIAOMI.

this is a bad thing .... welcome back to the 00's.....CDMA.....was bad.

There seems to be a lot of FUD here, but I'll just chime in with my personal anecdote: I've been using eSIM functionality for a couple years with 0 issues whatsoever. The Google Fi workflow is basically just to log in and it's automatically set up. The Mint Mobile workflow is just 'get a barcode in your email and scan it from your phone'. I assume others are similar.

The only use case I can think of where any of that breaks down is where you're in a situation where you broke your phone AND you don't have internet access. But as far as I'm concerned, a visit to your neighbor or local library is enough to fix that.

I have an iphone that supports one eSIM and one physical SIM. Currently using it on a US network with a physical SIM.

So what's the tradeoff with traveling: should I move the US carrier to eSIM and buy physical nanoSIMs in destination countries or the opposite (keep "home" carrier on physical and buy eSIMs when traveling).

My use case is to have a local number for things like restaurant reservations and other "someone local may need to call me" needs, using WiFi in India, etc while keeping my "home" number active for whatsapp/iMessage etc purposes.

This also puts an end to burner phones.

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