How many iSIMs will a phone support? Will they support dual iSIMs or triple iSIMs so I can use one mobile number for work, another for my personal life and a third to use when I'm travelling overseas and want to avoid expensive roaming charges?
At least here in the EU, carriers don't follow typical US customs any more... a series of court verdicts following the 2005 commerce directive has all but eliminated SIM locking and other hostile practices by carriers, the worst you (unfortunately) still get is bloatware.
The only issue I can see is that I can't take that card out and put it in a USB modem to use in my router. But I have seperate SIM for that, that has cheaper data plan than my ordinary phone.
In all of the interactions I've had, eSIM works without issue and right away. Most of the times I've needed a physical SIM card I've had to wait for it to be mailed or plan a trip to a physical store, or the old one is the wrong size and I need a new one or an adapter.
With SIMs I would have had to order it through the post like a week in advance, and there's no way I would have gotten that price.
eSIMs are amazingly convenient for travelling: https://esimdb.com/
I swap SIMs every couple of years, so a delay of 48h is well within the scope of planning for such an event. Additionally, I happened to do an eSIM swap today and it took about an hour.
For some use cases it's more convenient than a physical card, for some use cases (or implementations) it's less convenient. That doesn't make it insane.
- there are far less providers that support eSIM and the ones that do generally charge more than providers that also support a standard SIM
- it’s often not possible to create a new account using an eSIM. I’ve had to buy a physical SIM and then go through a complicated transfer process and have to either wait on hold for a long time or go into a store to swap over to an eSIM with two different providers.
Most physical SIM cards these days come as a 3-in-1 that fits standard, micro and nano sizes so the size incompatibility issues seem to be mostly fixed in my country at least.
the concept itself is fine the implementation is a downgrade since it gives the carriers more control