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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

This looks like paid Qualcomm PR, for the following reason.

From the article, it looks a lot like Qualcomm trying to coopt the eSIM success now a few years old, by saying the electronics of iSIM are a custom block in their silicon, not a separate small chip.

But it doesn't clarify that others (like Apple obviously) can't realize their eSIMs in their custom SOC, as far as i see.

> Qualcomm says "the new iSIM is fully compliant with the GSMA Remote SIM Provisioning standard; meaning its subscriptions are remotely manageable through any standard platforms." That's the same standard as eSIM, and it's held to all the same security requirements, so theoretically, any carrier that works with eSIM shouldn't see a difference between an eSIM and an iSIM. iSIM is still just a hunk of silicon that needs software provisioning—where the silicon lives shouldn't really matter to your carrier.

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> From the article, it looks a lot like Qualcomm trying to coopt the eSIM success now a few years old, by saying the electronics of iSIM are a custom block in their silicon, not a separate small chip.

I haven't gone into the details but certification is a major undertaking. So yes the logical functionality of what goes into an eSIM may be almost identical to that of an iSIM but integrating that same logic into an SoC means a whole new certification process. In particular certification will consider resistance to physical attacks and the hardening employed will be effected by the SoC integration. You need to bury critical nets deep in the metal stack to help defeat probing attacks and add detectors for intrusions. Integrating these across the whole SoC could be a particular challenge so work may required to apply them only across the chip area used by the iSIM. New design work was likely required for the on-chip interfacing between the iSIM and the rest of the SoC, again needing to ensure it complied with certification requirements.

I don't think it's fair to describe this as a mere PR piece. Significant work will have been required by backend engineers to integrate the iSIM so it's suitable for certification plus all the work required to generate the collateral for certification.

Qualcomm haven't created a whole new piece of technology here but this doesn't mean integrating the existing technology wasn't a major amount of work and a milestone worth publicising (especially as it is the first instance of this).

Yeah AFAICT this article is just: Qualcomm is now a certified producer of eSIMs. They put them in the SoC.

Everything else including the term "iSIM" just seems to be marketing cruft?

Perhaps I'm missing some detail but it seems the only people who would have any reason to care about this would be Qualcomm's customers in the mobile OEM space.

Because it's in software, they can legally disable your phone and force you to buy a new phone every 3 year citing "security patches no longer being issued". Bye bye aftermarket firmware second life !

They could be doing this already if they wanted to. I agree they shouldn't have this ability in the first place, but this doesn't change anything.

They can't do that with physical SIMs, because at least in the EU, there are regulations against that (to regulate stuff like phones and SIMs locked to each other)

I couldn't find that regulation and looking at wikipedia regulations about that are country specific:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#European_Union

It seems sim locking is legal, but unlocking has to be allowed after some time.

I couldn't see anything that would differentiate between a carrier lock by esim vs a sim.

By EU law, the vendor of the phone has to provide updates for N year. There is no such regulation for SIM cards. ( Provided by telco's ) This means the vendor of the phone, not the telco, can simply say "we did our N years of updates", rendering the phone useless as esim requires it in order to function. It's beyond the power of the telco, because it did not provide the esim. It's not a "SIM lock", it's far more devious.

That could be bad, I would have never thought of that implication.

I'm not sure that would happen wouldn't most telcos be interested to allow as many users on the network as possible?

People whose devices get obsoleted by eSIM won't suddenly drop off the grid - they'll go and buy a new phone, because being on the mobile network is almost a requirement in most of the world these days.

With the above in mind, note that it just so happens that telcos sell mobile devices as well as the service. This means they'll make money on increasing device churn.

I don't believe such a law exists on the EU level.

What do you think would stop them from doing this to a phone using a physical SIM card? I don’t see how an eSIM makes a difference in this scenario.

Because doing that on a phone with a physical SIM does not have a plausible justification.

But with a software-based solution, they can argue that due to the lack of updates your device is now vulnerable and your SIM can be cloned, spoofed and so you should get rid of it.

With a physical SIM those hacks are not possible even if I'm on a 20 yr old dumb-phone, because all the auth logic resides in the SIM itself.

> With a physical SIM those hacks are not possible even if I'm on a 20 yr old dumb-phone, because all the auth logic resides in the SIM itself.

Not nearly all parts of authentication and encryption happen in the SIM, and older generation phones are regularly deprecated (most recently for CDMA in the US and 3G in Germany for example, but also for non-VoLTE-capable devices on some networks in the US).

>most recently for CDMA in the US and 3G in Germany for example, but also for non-VoLTE-capable devices on some networks in the US

This is quickly turning into all networks. I'm seeing a lot more people running into VoLTE issues now in dumbphone and digital wellbeing groups that are picking up old/cheap LTE capable phones to try out the lifestyle. T-Mobile was the last to fold and start whitelisting even in the MVNO space where usually we don't run into problems. There are cheap VoLTE capable phones that are available, but its become an easy way for carriers to thin out older devices from the networks.

> This looks like paid Qualcomm PR, for the following reason

Ars Technica does not do paid articles. They put a disclaimer to that effect on car reviews when a manufacturer pays for flight and hotel costs.

Ars Technica says they in fact do paid articles; it's in their funding description at least post Conde Nast acquisition. They might not for car reviews, however.

iSIM is a standard defined by the GSMA standards body. Qualcomm did not make up the term.

I have largely given up arguing for / explaining anything 3GPP related on HN. Also disappointed it is the top comment.

I've always found that space rather isolated, for whatever reason. We read daily about yet-another-run-js-on-the-backend tool, but rarely see happenings in the mobile world.

I for one would much appreciate anyone taking time to shed light. And as someone who can also say dumb things, I also appreciate being corrected/educated.

Not that either is your job, just listing my feelings as an avid reader.

disclaimer: not sure why it is or was top comment either, but i did work for several years both at Qualcomm on a custom soc block and on extending V8 to use a new architecture, then several years at Apple in hw also. So i do know what you mean, and i do wonder what is up with the article, but presume you similarly know Qualcomm's contentious relation with Apple, historically.

Huh, if that's the case, why would the linked article claim that they want to replace eSIM? Is Ars just wrong here?

> But it doesn't clarify that others (like Apple obviously) can't realize their eSIMs in their custom SOC, as far as i see.

Of course they can, all they need to do is pass certification.

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