SIM Cards Must Die | Hacker News Reader

SIM Cards Must Die

ilyabirman.net

148 pointsadeelk138 comments

I'm afraid if we kill SIM cards, the opposite will happen: your phone will be locked to one network, and switching networks means switching hardware (beyond just the sim). I really like that while traveling I can just buy a local sim, put it in my own phone, and use it. That would only work in these wireframes if all operators would agree to support this. Which I think they won't.

Pretty much this. In fact, it's already happening to some extent -- most Verizon phones are sold without a SIM. (At least, not a user-accessible SIM.)

That's been the case for ages because Verizon is a CDMA network, not GSM -- GSM takes SIM cards, while CDMA does not. Different tech.

This is likely to shift as V rolls out LTE, which DOES take SIM cards. So we're actually likely to see more intercompatibility as things progress. Except, of course, that everything's still likely to be carrier-locked.

Pardon my ignorance, but being in Europe means I've never used a 2G CDMA network - the iPhone4S supposedly works for both GSM and CDMA; if you don't get a SIM, does the CDMA module only work if you bought the phone from a CDMA network operator, and not if you bought it from Apple directly?

> does the CDMA module only work if you bought the phone from a CDMA network operator

Yes. They program it with your subscriber number at purchase. Technically they could reprogram phones not sold by them with your subscriber number, but they don't (to force you to give them more money).

There does exist a CDMA version of the SIM (RUIM? something like that). China Mobile uses it, and I think au/kddi do too. American carriers do not.

I am surprised they allows that. That sounds like a far more obvious antitrust violation than putting an IE icon on the Windows desktop.

It gets worse in Canada. They carrier lock the phones to the brands. There's a big phone company called Telus that has a brand called Koodo and you can't swap phones between them even though it's actually the same network. All the joys of fake competition with none of the compatibility!

CDMA phones come with an ESN (http://www.mobileburn.com/definition.jsp?term=ESN). It's basically like your SIM card number, except that it doesn't change.

CDMA carriers can activate a phone not sold by them by ESN. However, some carriers have decided that they would prefer you to buy a handset from them and refuse to activate devices that weren't sold by them. Sprint has a policy of not activating any ESN that comes from a phone they didn't sell. I'm not sure if that applies to the iPhone since a non-Sprint iPhone would really be the same device. Anyway, unlike SIM cards, you're more at the mercy of whether a carrier will activate it or not.

ESN is equivalent to IMEI in GSM/UMTS networks. IMEI is tied to equipment, and never changes, just like ESN.

CDMA networks use IMSI to identify subscribers (as opposed to the equipment serial number) just like GSM/UMTS. IMSIs are provisioned on to the phone by the carrier with special software supplied by the phone manufacturer, instead of being supplied to the phone by the phone asking the SIM for it.

There's no technical reason why CDMA networks can't use a removable card to store subscriber data, and indeed there are a few standards for doing so (RUIM and CSIM) and a few carriers that use them.

Is there actually any benefit to CDMA?

It doesn't interfere with your speakers when transmitting? I'm not sure if this is still the case, but my old AT&T phone would cause my speakers to go haywire when I was about to receive a phone call. Never experienced that with Verizon or Sprint.

I think that's only the case for 2G (GSM, GPRS, EDGE). UMTS (3G) doesn't do that.

Yeah... Being ancient technology, the carriers have had more time to put towers everywhere, thus giving better coverage.

However, you still can't do data and voice at the same time.

I'm been curious about this, it seems they can can do it over SVDO, but for some reason only HTC seems to actually support this.. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1012752.

What are you talking about? GSM dates back to the mid 1980s and the first spec was published in 1991. The first mobile phone CDMA standard didn't come into play until 1995.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-95

Depending on how you look at it, there can be many benefits, but as with most technologies, they're contextual.

CDMA uses 1.25MHz channels. That can be limiting in some ways, but advantageous in others. When deploying UMTS channels, AT&T or T-Mobile would need to clear out 10MHz of spectrum. Back when 3G wireless was first getting off the ground, it was decently common for a carrier to have below 30MHz in a market. To give two examples, Sprint and T-Mobile both had an average spectrum depth of around 25MHz. Sprint was able to get out of the gate fast on 3G requiring only 2.5MHz (around 10% of their spectrum) to deploy. T-Mobile had to wait until it purchased new AWS spectrum years later. The UMTS channels would have taken up 40% of their spectrum. So, it was difficult to clear out enough space to deploy UMTS. You were basically taking a third to half of your spectrum and making it unavailable for current customers. Then, as you launched the network and started selling 3G devices, customers would start moving their usage to the new technology. EV-DO (the CDMA data standard), on the other hand, only required a carrier to free up 2.5MHz of spectrum to deploy 3G. Even today, it can be an issue. As the number of GSM customers dwindle, AT&T and T-Mobile want to allocate more spectrum to UMTS. However, they can only do that in 10MHz chunks. They don't get to say, "ah, there's 3MHz that we should move to UMTS".

Likewise, because UMTS does voice and data, it meant that carriers had to install SS7 and mobile switching gear to handle the voice. EV-DO was an all-IP network that wasn't going to handle voice. While that could be a disadvantage in some ways, it provided the benefit of being easier to deploy in terms of equipment.

Taking that a step further, the lack of a voice requirement for EV-DO meant that they could launch a network in a much more piecemeal fashion. If one launched a UMTS network with lots of holes, call quality would be poor. Sure, calls could hand-off to GSM, but they might have a "1-bar" UMTS signal with crummy call quality while GSM users got excellent quality. Back then, if data didn't work or was delayed a bit, it didn't matter that much. People used data infrequently compared to calling and call reliability is what people paid for.

It should also be noted that when EV-DO was first deployed, it was faster than UMTS. UMTS R99 had a peak data rate of 384kbps, well below the 2.4Mbps of EV-DO Rel 0. Now, the wider band of UMTS made it more future-proof, but initially EV-DO looked very good.

To be fair to UMTS, I could talk about problems with CDMA as well. CDMA offered a bit more of a practical, easier transition to 3G for carriers. It's narrower channels made it easy to carve out spectrum, the fact that there wasn't a voice component meant that less equipment was needed and it didn't require the same initial reliability, etc.

CDMA also has better voice quality, although I'm not sure if this is a bandwidth thing or a codec thing, and not sure how universal it is on deployed networks.

My understanding from a friend in the telecom business is that, because the network operates at higher power, you need fewer towers for the same coverage area as GSM (GSM has a limit of something like 30km from a tower). And it tolerates multiple users in the same frequency space better than GSM and is less prone to interference from terrestrial radio signals.

edit: here's a great comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_stan...

In the US, indirectly. Verizon tends to have the best coverage in many parts of the country.

A heck of a lot, and all current phone standards are based on it including current GSM.

GSM used TDMA which sliced a frequency into time slots. The time slots are allocated to the phones whether there is talking or not. This also leads to a fixed number of connections per frequency, and adjacent towers can't use the same frequency. It is also not forwards compatible since the phones expect certain behaviour from other phones in terms of using the time slots. That is why GSM carriers had to go out and get new frequencies when they added 2G data.

CDMA just has all phones broadcast at once. The phones merely see others as noise. When there isn't anything to transmit (voice calls have a lot of silence) then not much is transmitted. The tower will direct power levels to phones to keep the noise as low as possible. The net effect is that there isn't a fixed number of connections per tower/frequency, adjacent towers can use the same frequencies and it is forwards compatible - other phones can use newer versions and it won't affect current phones. CDMA is a lot harder engineering.

Here are a bunch of articles describing it in more detail from someone who worked on it.

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml (politics, tech, how CDMA happened) http://denbeste.nu/cdmafaq/cdmatdma.shtml (tdma versus cdma) http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/04/Howspreadingactual... (what actually gets transmitted)

Yep, a SIM card gives freedom from networks and the ability to change numbers easily and use pay as you go services when travelling.

There's no way killing SIM cards would be a good thing.

This and Panmans comments were my first thought when I read that piece. I like the SIM card. When I went backpacking round the world I was able to pick up a pay as you go SIM card from a local store in any country, load it with credit and pop it in my phone and I'm all good to go. None of this sharing information from my phone business. You don't need to know my identity or payment information. I don't want the hassle of calling customer services in a country where they speak very little english because all of a sudden I have had £50 taken from my account due to some set up issue or whatever.

Anyway, as panman says, i think it will cause the opposite effect. Didn't the original GSM phones work in a similar way, with no SIM and some sort of mapping to a phone number at the carrier end? What is the likelihood that the carriers would remove the ability to change carriers, pretty high i'd say.

Going out on a limb here, but

  Didn't the original GSM phones work in a similar way, with no SIM and some sort of mapping to a phone number at the carrier end?

As far as I know (and recall), SIM was always part of the GSM specifications.

The first SIMs where credit card sized. Later generations where still credit card sized, but with a perforated breakout for the SIM as we know it (mostly).

The predecessor system (analogue mobile) didn't use SIM.

Ahhh, it was the old analogue phones I was thinking of. I never had one, my brother did though. I remember the big sim card and the perforated ones too :)

And while NMT phones didn't use easily (and user) replaceable SIM, they were paired to operator/number not by some database but by contents of replaceable EPROM chip in them. SIM cards were introduced not to make changing carriers possible, but easier and also more secure (NMT phones could be cloned without direct access to phone, only by eavesdropping on signaling channel).

I find the opposite version of that quite useful too - swapping SIMs lets me change my phone hardware out independently of my carrier/phonenumber. I can (with a $2 microsim adaptor) switch between an iPhone, a Galaxy SII, and occasionally a tiny not-very-"smart"phone-but-perfectly-adequate-for-voice-and-text Huewei device. Phone calls and text messages just arrive at whatever device I've got my SIM in.

Yes, totally agree with this. There is a comment further down here that someone says they swap out their SIM into an old dumB phone when out biking since if they fall the phone is less likely break. I've had the screen crack on a phone when it was in my back pocket and I sat on something. It's also handy swapping out to those basic dumb phones when you have no recharge facilities available, like when you are at a music festival, or out camping for the weekend.

Agree with the general sentiment. The down side is something I'm waiting (hoping) for someone to fix. If I get a text message on one phone I can't get to it when I put the SIM into my other phone.

It'd be awesome if there was an operator-netural, handset-neutral, multi-platform and secure cloud-based SMS sync service.

Google Voice.

Yeah, if it worked outside the US I'd be on it in a flash. I suspect Twilio will have local-to-me-in-Australia endpoints before Google Voice does, so a hand-rolled Twilio solution is probably in my future.

Actually most older phones (first generation gsm-phones) stored sms (and contact-list) directly on the sim-card.

Swapping the sim into another phone and you would have everything accessible. Some phones had their own memory also so you could choose where to store it or it would revert to SIM when phone memory was out.

Problem was that the memory on the SIM was incredibly slow and small and had no support for advanced contact list management(like multiple numbers per name), so now every phone has its own storage.

Yes, my Nokia 8850 had no internal storage and therefore i could only hold 10 messages on the SIM. The later SIM's had more memory and could store 20 messages!

Seems strange having a phone that even stores them individually and doesn't group my contact these days!

Americans don't know that because their phone companies forbid that practice. AT&T doesn't even bother to move your SIM card from your old iPhone to your new iPhone when you upgrade, they just give you a new card.

That's not correct. I've used my phone on multiple carriers just by swapping the SIM card - and when I upgraded my phone, they used my existing SIM card.

Really, they give you a new sim on upgrade? I can understand this if you are upgrading TO an iPhone since you need a micro SIM, but rather pointless otherwise.

I think I've had the same SIM card for about 6-7 years now!

My experience with AT&T is they've always given me a new SIM, when buying a new phone from them, but I've also bought raw sim's from them with no problem.

I think they just write the "New Phone" script for their employees, with a new sim, so the steps,are always the same. Less chances to mess things up when there are less choices.

Older sims dont have 3G capabilities either. (Not sure why)

Mine is defo new enough that it supports that! Anyone know if you need a new sim card to support 4G services?

IIRC, yes, at least for AT&T's LTE -- HSDPA (and HSUPA, HSPA+, etc) will work just fine with a 3G SIM (since they're just souped-up 3G).

This is something weird that I've discovered too.

I am now on T-Mobile (from AT&T) and there are all sorts of T-Mobile features that may or may not work depending on what SIM card you have in your phone. And if they don't work you have to get a new SIM card (that is not guaranteed not to disable other features.)

What!? That seems to be the weirdest thing ever. What is going on?

Older sims are missing the USIM "applet" that contains the data necessary to negotiate with UMTS networks.

When I switched from my old MotoRAZR to the iPhone, I used the same SIM. Just popped it in and I was good to go. My SIM still has the Cingular logo on it!

And complete anonymity. Most people don't care about this, but some of us do, sometimes. You buy a pay as you go sim card for £10, pay with cash, and toss it a week or month later.

You have to replace the handset too; calls are likable both to sim and equipment. Buying a prepaid handset with CDMA account esn built in is just as anonymous.

Can you still do this? I've tried in a few countries but had to register online with all my personal details before the card got activated.

You can in the UK.

Retailers are supposed to take your name and address when buying a PAYG phone/SIM with cash. I've seen a Carphone Warehouse refuse a sale because of it - although they also don't verify the information you give them, so you could just lie.

This is currently hung on the SIM. Couldn't it just as well be hung on a web service, or paypal account? Why make it physical? This screams for virtualization.

The nice thing about having a physical object is that I can hand it easily to someone else, I can destroy it, I can save it, and I can do all these things when my service provider has disconnected me.

Same with an independent cloud service.

There HAS to be a better way than carrying around a legacy device.

>>>your phone will be locked to one network

This is exactly what happened with the original analog and CDMA networks. Most carriers these days have converged on the HSPA and LTE standards which thankfully support SIM cards.

There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done. As evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of SIM cards, this particular battle has been won by almost unanimous decision in favour of the cards.

Only a few bastions of the original CDMA networks still don't natively support SIM cards (e.g. South Korea). But on the whole, it was already decided that SIM cards are here to stay since carriers demonstrated that without them, they are more prone to higher switching costs.

> There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done.

Indeed. RUIMs (and CSIMs) were standardized for CDMA, but carriers in the americas never bothered with them. A fair number of asian countries have CDMA carriers that use the, though.

This assumes you have a phone that isn't already SIM-locked, like most of them are when purchased from carriers.

I will definitely be shopping more carefully the next time I purchase a phone. I have an AT&T iphone 4. It works well, I have good coverage, and it can be used internationally, but AT&T will never unlock a phone, even after your contract is up, or if you are traveling overseas. I was in Europe for a week, and as soon as the phone connects, I get a text from AT&T saying that the data rate is $19.97/MB! Data was off, because I knew it would be a rip-off, but I had not guessed to what extent.

That's not strictly true -- they just won't unlock an iPhone. http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=55002&cv=820...

You're right of course. Somehow that doesn't make me any happier.

The SIM is an integral part of the GSM standard and provides a huge range of benefits. The point of their existence is to establish the identity of a subscriber independently of a handset, which has a lot of interesting, useful and important side-effects.

A very large proportion of GSM subscribers use dual-sim handsets, to take advantage of the cheapest available tariffs. This is the norm in price-sensitive markets like China, India and Africa.

Many GSM subscribers use several phones with the same SIM. Outdoor enthusiasts switch their SIM between their smartphone and a rugged dumbphone. Some ladies use a smartphone during the week when they use their normal handbag, but switch to a tiny dumbphone for parties.

The SIM makes life very easy for small carriers to connect new subscribers. In London, virtually every shopping centre and high street has someone handing out SIMs for Lyca or Lebara, two Virtual Network Operators offering cheap international calls to mainly immigrant customers. They can connect subscribers on the spot in a matter of seconds.

IMO we should be working in the opposite direction, towards a proliferation of SIM-like devices in other markets. A physical token which securely establishes a pseudonymous identity on a network is quite ingenious and facilitates all sorts of really elegant HCI.

To be fair, most of what you're talking about can be achieved without the use of a physical device. The features are useful, the "SIM card" is not.

But your first example isn't like that: the SIM card, in essence, is a form of two-factor authentication. And it's really useful that way. Unfortunately it's a pity that it can only be used by the carriers...

It also expands consumer choice, if only incrementally.

For example, the US carrier T-Mobile has a whole lot of customers with iPhones despite not offering it themselves. That's possible because consumers are able to pick up a used GSM iPhone and stick their SIM card into it.

That isn't really happening for US Cellular, because Verizon and Sprint's (SIMless) handsets can't readily be made to connect to talk to their network.

The problem here is that Americans haven't ever experienced a competitive mobile telephony market where all carriers use the same network technology and switching networks is trivial. That's probably why our coverage is terrible and we pay 3-5 times more than people in other countries.

(North) American telco misregulation is a disaster.

I've found that the opposite is true when traveling - every new country I go to requires a different (local prepaid) sim card. My iPhone 4S stays the same, but I end up with a new sim card and phone number while I'm in the country, and then end up throwing out the sim card once I leave.

Try something like http://www.globalsimcard.co.uk/index.php or http://www.roammobility.com/sim-card , one SIM that automatically goes local whichever country you are in.

I suppose you live in the US, with only a couple of huge carriers. I live in Germany, I am French, travelling a lot between France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland. I am so happy with the SIM card system. I can switch carrier if I want easily (swap the SIM card) but especially:

I do not care when I travel which carrier my phone will pick. It will work, nothing to do and I know what it will cost in advance.

I love SIM cards.

Update: Keep reading the thread with very good comments about identity. The added benefit of the SIM card is that it is protecting/managing your identity on the network without a hard link between your phone and you.

This

I travel enough to see the benefits as well. Phones that handle multiple sim cards are also nice.

I also view it as an added layer of security. My phone can't be connected to the network until the pin for my sim is entered. The ability to save data to the sim is also a nice feature. I don't really see any reason for them to go away.

Each phone could have a built in key for signing. You could tell operators to not allow any other phone except for yours (which has this key) to access your account. Not a problem.

Though, going to a store and proving who you are just to change a phone would be annoying. Maybe we could automate this. For extra security, we could use something besides a username and password. Maybe, the phone company could give us something, and we could use that to identify ourselves. Something we have. Maybe we could get the manufacturers allow us to store the identifier in the phone itself, and the phone could read the id card, and tell the phone company "Hey, this guy is good people!" that way, the entire process is all automated.

Good idea!

What happens here - is the phone itself becomes the sim card. That is troublesome on a number of levels. I'd rather push those functions to a little piece of plastic that is easy to move between handsets.

"You could tell operators"... How and where? When I'm in Thailand on vacation, I want data but I don't want to have to worry about registering my phone - I just go to kiosk and get a sim.

When I was in Ethiopia a few weeks ago getting a sim took a bit of work. I had to give them photos and some other documentation. A lot of governments are moving this way. Once it was done though, I had the sims I needed and the phone choices were wide open.

Maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle but in my experience the sim is what makes me free. The idea that the existence of a sim == being locked down comes from a broken telecom system not a technical limitation of the format.

There are some countries you do have to give extra documentation, and often providers will rip you off by giving you more airtime only if you register.

Funny you mention Ethiopia, the telecom there is completely state controlled, and it has been used to thwart opposition (listen in on calls, shut down complete SMS, etc). It's one of the many "remnants" of the communist regime. Supposedly Orange was coming in to manage and change that however...

SIM cards are exactly this, with the added benefit of (almost) two factor authentication. If I have my SIM card, I can be reasonably confident that you can't pretend to be me. If phones managed keys, I'd be more worried that you've managed to copy my key somehow.

Especially give the sheer number of apps out there and reports of apps doing more than they should, as well as users blindly installing apps with higher permissions than they actually require. This would get exploited very quickly no doubt.

I'd love to see a pocket hub that will take multiple sims & route my calls transparently over WiFi/VoIP.

Tell one major problem with SIM is the ancient outdated hard locked data model, and phone software developers refusing to implement a proper merge when exposing both SIM and phone data in UI.

But you will pay outrageous roaming charges. Why should you? Would you accept roaming charges on Wi-Fi access when abroad?

They wont pay roaming because they swap sims - 4th sentence.

Why would you pay roaming charges when you swap sim card for a local one?

Besides it's not that bad in EU with roaming anymore http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/t...

Also, some operators allow to purchase "european data" - ie. unlimited european data roaming for cheap.

FYI, Birman lives in Russia.

I don't think you love simcards, I think you love the freedom to switch & a simcard is just the way you get that freedom right now. From a UX perspective the simcard is a pretty weak solution. For a starter, why do I have to reboot my phone to switch carriers?

You don't have to reboot your phone (e.g. the iPhone doesn't need a reboot when switching SIM cards). But a lot of phones hide the SIM under the battery, and your phone won't keep running with its battery off.

> From a UX perspective the simcard is a pretty weak solution.

Actually from a UX perspective sim cards are a pretty strong solution because there is a clear and simple 1:1 mapping between a physical object and a carrier. That's as simple an UX as can be: if I want to use carrier A I use SIM A, if I want to use carrier B I use SIM B.

> For a starter, why do I have to reboot my phone to switch carriers?

I don't know, do you? I don't. I just take out the iPhone's SIM tray, replace the SIM and put the tray back in.

> Actually from a UX perspective sim cards are a pretty strong solution because there is a clear and simple 1:1 mapping between a physical object and a carrier. That's as simple an UX as can be: if I want to use carrier A I use SIM A, if I want to use carrier B I use SIM B.

That must be why it's so common and popular to use physical tokens for the address list too. I really live to sift through the little plastic cards I keep in my pant pocket (careful not to lose one!) to find John Doe, insert it into the phone and reboot, just to make a phone call.

Or not.

Your nonalogy makes no sense whatsoever:

* Addresses don't significantly impact the phone's behavior (and its costs), current ISP does

* As I noted, you might want to get out more, phones don't need to reboot when changing SIM

* Considering the number of people who criticize iPhones for not having a µSD slot, physical tokens do indeed seem trendy in crowds which need them

> Your nonalogy makes no sense whatsoever:

I'll agree it has several flaws. Still.

> Addresses don't significantly impact the phone's behavior (and its costs)

That would be a reason to keep the interface a physical token? Elaborate, please.

> phones don't need to reboot when changing SIM

The stupidly designed ones (with the sim behind the battery) does, but I see your point.

> people who criticize iPhones for not having a µSD slot

I was under the impression they miss the ease of data transfer and cheap storage space, not the act of changing the card to access other data. Please elaborate.

Actually the analogy is good. Having a physical token is very messy from a UX perspective. A menu is just as easy: If i want to use carrier A, i select carrier A in the menu, if i want to use carrier B, i select carrier B in the menu. This is what i do every day with my WiFi-network on my laptop....

Your µSD-comparison is what doesn't make sense. An SD-card can contain several gigabytes of data that would take hours to transfer to the phone. A SIM-card probably has a small key on maybe a few kilobytes that can be transfered and stored by any more or less modern communication-method, wired or not, within a few seconds.

But from a security perspective SIM is a much better solution because once you make the key transferable by software it will be much easier to steal an identity.

Business cards are hardly ideal. But, knowing that someone now has your correct contact information, because you just handed it to them is worth something. The problems only really show up when you want to keep several addresses at the same time and for most people that's rarely an issue with SIM cards.

"Why isn’t Apple fighting to kill the SIM cards?"

They tried: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/05/24/apple-wanted-to-...

Personally I'm a big supporter of SIM cards. While competing network systems (CDMA, iDEN) were designed to lock in networks and users to a single vendor, GSM was designed by a consortium of european national telecoms at every single layer to ensure that all the stakeholders (users, telecoms, regulators) had as much interoperability and freedom as possible, and SIM cards are the user's end of that plan.

If Apple implemented his proposal, you can bet iPhone users would only be able to pick special overpriced iPhone plans, instead of just using whatever prepaid plan they want.

This guy so doesn't get it. It's almost as if he is trolling.

SIM cards (as implemented everywhere in the world except the US) is made to allow exactly the portability which he seeks.

I fail to see why it is even linked here.

Edit: Also why is he illustrating this with an iPhone? Is it for lulz that he in the name of advocating openness links to the closest closed phone of all out there?

I'm voting troll here.

"I'm voting troll here." - Me too. Sorry for asking a noob quesiton, how do you vote troll on HN?

I don't think you literally "vote" troll, it was meant more symbolically. :)

I think the author is conflating SIM cards with vendor lock-in. Phones locked to SIM cards from a particular carrier are not good. If you want them to die, then fine - but that's got nothing to do with SIM cards.

SIM cards as authentication tokens work just fine. My phone takes SIM cards from any carrier. If I want to switch carriers, the new carrier just sends me a new SIM card.

Get rid of SIM cards, and you're going to end up with a security problem with keys being copied/cloned from phones. You're going to find that you need some kind of authentication based on a hardware crypto token, and will end up inventing...the SIM card.

In the UK now (possibly the EU) at the end of your contract (normally 18-24 months) the carrier has to unlock your phone now, my brother just came to the end of his contract and had his iPhone unlocked for free.

In the EU in general you can unlock your phone for a price, even if you're under contract.

The last time I checked Orange was charging something like 70 EUR for unlocking iPhones under contract, which is really not bad, considering you get the freedom to put any SIM in it after that.

Also, my own mobile carrier (Cosmote) sells subsidized unlocked iPhones. Basically for them the contract is enough to keep you "locked" as if you terminate early, you have to give back the subsidy you received for the remaining time, which is fair to both consumers and the mobile carrier.

It's crazy how better the mobile carriers are in Europe, versus the US.

In the Netherlands, even on prepaid they are required to do so after 12 months.

The SIM card is so you CAN easily change your identity / phone. Without a SIM, how does the network verify your identity? A simple username and password are not as secure, and tying your identity to your phone is exactly what SIM cards were introduced to avoid.

A username and password is secure enough for things more important than this.

No.

They aren't. That they can be used as such does not make what you said true.

Hum ... like what ? It is quite critical, someone with your username/passwd would be able to call for several hours without you knowing it.

A lot of banks don't support two-form authentication. A lot of online merchants keep credit card information on file and allow for quick check-outs.

And they count on being able to use your phone to confirm identity. Someone could hack your bank and phone at the same time so when you get a call about the suspicious transaction, it really goes to the hacker who says "yep, that was me".

I don't see what sim cards have to do with locking in customers. Even in his hypothetical sim-free future there is nothing preventing the carrier from saying "if you select this plan you must pay us $59/month for the next 2 years before we let you cancel".

Indeed, as can be seen with Verizon (which does not use SIM cards on account of being a CDMA network)

And the other way around, nothing in SIM cards mandate lock-ins, I bought my phone unlocked (the previous one was bought simlocked and I'd made use of my legal rights to get it unlocked 6 months into my contract) and my current ISP is pre-paid, no-contract on SIMs. I ordered a SIM from them, popped it into my phone and I fill the account when I need to.

And when I travel across europe, I can trivially get cheapo pre-paid SIMs and put them in if I need to. There is no lock anywhere.

In fact, I'd expect far more lock-in with TFA's solution: my current indie ISP never managed to get a reply from Apple when they tried to get their IPCC into iTunes (so user would not have to enter e.g. data network info by hand), Apple only deals with big ISPs, not with virtual operators for a few tens of thousand clients in minor euro countries.

I have an old Moto Razr that I put my SIM card in when I go on long bike rides in the boonies. The battery lasts longer and if I fall I don't have to worry about crushing my smartphone.

SIM cards are the only thing left protecting consumers from carriers and to a lesser extent Apple. Apple still lock out features (APN settings, tethering) even on SIM-free models of the iPhone when a "recognized" carrier is connected. The only reason they do this is to protect carriers.

There's actually a really good reason why this isn't coming anytime soon to the US: number portability is not entirely centralized, and the porting system is built to run in batch, not in realtime.

So if, say, Sprint issues a portability request to Syniverse (the mapping platform provider) so that they can have your number from Verizon, Syniverse puts that request in the next batch. Then the batch gets passed to VZ for evaluation for things like whether you still owe them money. If you're good to go, VZ kills your DN (that's your number and the associated SVC mapping), and your VZ service goes dead. Then they pass your record back to Syniverse who then passes the thumbs-up and the number to Sprint who sets up a new DN to your new service (and presumably your new handset if you're going from one locked-in CDMA net to another).

That's a really watered down, 4am version of what happens. But the upshot of all of it is that if it worked like WiFi SSID switching, every time you switched, you'd probably lose service for awhile. If all things work for the good, the switch can take like 10 minutes. I'm sure they could get it down to 1 or 2. But probably not 0.

Here's the punchline... the SIM card in GSM was specifically designed to OBVIATE the need for all that (also to act as an encryption key, but that got hacked years ago). The SIM is supposed to authenticate you to a particular DN and link you back to a billing record at your primary carrier. The theory was that every carrier would create roaming treaties, and you'd just wander from network to network, oblivious to whose actual network you were on. And your primary carrier would sort it out on the backend. And in many places, it actually pretty much works that way. You can carry 3 or 4 cards and swap carriers and numbers based on the plan you want to use. Because the phones aren't locked to a single carrier's cards.

A good example of this is that in the T-Mobile / AT&T breakup, they came to an agreement to allow cross-network roaming sometime late this year. So if you're a TMo subscriber, but you've got an AT&T signal, even in a TMo service area, you'll just ride AT&T instead.

So essentially the reason it doesn't already work this way is because A) CDMA is so popular in the US, and CDMA really requires the rigorous porting process, and B) the carriers who do support it (AT&T, TMo and Sprint on their now-dwindling GSM net) have been jerks about it for years. It's a business decision, not a technical one.

In principle, I love this idea. In practice, without a great deal of work, this will make it much more difficult to switch between phones, which typically occurs more often than switching carriers. Right now, you can pull out a SIM and put it in a new phone, and you can immediately use the phone number with that new phone, without any interaction with the carrier.

> In practice, without a great deal of work, this will make it much more difficult to switch between phones, which typically occurs more often than switching carriers.

In practice it also makes it much more difficult to switch between carriers (which is in fact much more common than switching between phones when you travel across Europe or south-east asia): to switch carriers right now, I just need to replace my current SIM with a new one (assuming the phone is not SIM-locked, which it is not).

Old neighbours often ask me to set up their new (non-smart) phones for them, SIM cards make the process of moving contacts so much easier.

Nice, the intellectual failure of the "must die" meme in the headline correctly predicted the intellectual failure of the article. SIM cards solve a real problem for the consumer in a convenient way. Better to replace a 5 dollar card than a 500 dollar phone when I travel, and lucky to be able to transfer phones easily.

If your sim is implemented in software, how do you take it out of your smartphone when it breaks or runs out of battery and put it in a different phone?

As an engineer working in the SIM card industry, as long as they add some other form of secure element for placing highly sensitive data like bank/id applets it would still be reasonable.

As others have commented though, I'm afraid that they would use it to lock the consumer to phone specific plans.

I like a lot the ability to take my SIM card to other phones, as it allows to carry some kind of ID with me, there are better and seamless ways of doing that that I can't wait to be implemented and deployed (a user and password to put when booting the phone is not a solution).

The industry has been working on software SIMs for some time. I had a telco talking to me about the initiative years ago.

The problem is that the soft SIM provisioning process will become like DRM for phones. The users desires and the service providers desires are fundamentally misaligned here. Users want to be able to choose freely from the best tariffs available to them in a given location. Service providers want to lock people in and keep roaming expensive.

But surely this until the first carrier breaks the deadlock and then decides to offer soft SIMS to tourists ? Then the rest of then will be forced to follow on or else be squeezed out of the market. In fact, if you were a small-ish based carrier, then you could benefit from first-to-market as well as not being eaten by your customers going abroad (as you were first!).

I'm afraid the author of this blog post doesn't know what a SIM card is.

First of all, it's a secure element: it allows authentication of the user's credentials with the cell phone. SIMs and smart cards in general provide security at the hardware level as well as the software level (using Triple DES encryption).

Also, they are essential in NFC: that standard is developed around the SIM card and the ISO 14443 standard.

Recent technology also allows the development of Java programs WITHIN the SIM card (it's called a JavaCard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card ) and allows to use a single SIM for multiple applications. For instance, you could use your phone's SIM as a mobile wallet, a metro pass, etc...

Of course, as many others have noted in this thread, removing the SIM card would just add the vendor lock-in inside the phone.

Where I live (France), most phones can be legally (or illegally) unlocked to accept different SIM cards.

FYI, SIM cards aren't necessary for NFC. In fact, it is only the carriers that would prefer the SIM be used as the secure element, as they have control over it. Other potential NFC players would prefer the secure element be separate, so that the carrier doesn't have control over NFC-based transactions. And, ISO 14443 is not directly related NFC, which is governed by ISO 18092 and ISO 21481.

Ironically, the SIM card is exactly the technology that enables the scenario the author describes, and it exists today (maybe not so much in the US).

"Select from this list to send your payment information to an unknown carrier" is not exactly a realistic scenario. Instead, you have an agreement with an organization (let's call it "your carrier") who handles your payment information/billing, then that organization makes arrangements with other carriers to allow you to roam on their networks. The SIM is your account identifier, and most (GSM) phones allow you to select among available networks. Anyone who has used their GSM phone abroad has probably experienced this.

The only thing preventing the scenario he describes from being more common today is the reality of capital expenditure required to build a network and the consolidation of carriers (aka botched deregulation), making it uncommon in the US to have any real choice.

While the concept is solid, getting carriers to go along with this is going to be impossible I would imagine. The other issue at hand is hardware pricing, especially for US consumers.

In the US, carriers love to lock their customers in by SIM locking their subsidized hardware and customers have come to expect this low cost subsidized hardware.

If you suddenly switched to a system where hardware was sold at retail cost, there would be a lot of confusion. I am guessing that if you ask the typical US consumer if they would like to buy their iPhone at $199 and commit to a contract or pay $649 for the ability to switch to another carrier at will, they will choose the contract option. It's what they have come to expect.

This type of system seems more suited to work in countries where subscribers already purchase unlocked hardware at full retail prices.

Sure US consumers are generally ignorant about the ins and outs of subsidized hardware, and they take 2-year contracts as a matter of course. But there's no reason a lot of people wouldn't pay full price if the economics were laid bare.

For instance, when I tell my US friends that I pay £15 / month for unlimited data, 300 mins, and 3000 texts on my iPhone with tethering in the UK, it blows their minds. The fact that I can hop over to another country, buy a sim card for 10 bucks and instantly have data without having to sit on hold and beg a customer service rep to unlock my phone and then wait weeks is another huge bonus that any internationally traveling American can appreciate.

The only problem right now is that major carriers have a good thing going with overpriced contract plans and see little reason to offer reasonably priced pay as you go, thus giving Americans the impression that mobile service is inherently more expensive than it is and believing that they are getting a great deal with subsidized phones. But with globalization this illusion is bound to come crumbling down sooner or later, and customers will demand more.

Obviously the author of this blog post (a Russian Designer) is an outsider of telecom industry. Neither would I believe s/he knows anything about a standard called "GSM", let alone the part where how GSM handsets id/authenticate with the network and the purpose of SIM card is. The proof of my assertion? Check out the sketch on the page, there is a ghost mobile carrier indicator "ABC 3G" there for all three screens.

Piece of advice: before you attack on technologies, make sure you understand it first, the history and the reason why they exists. Otherwise, you are going to be a public joke on HN.

I recommend him/her to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_Identity_Module

A little

Apple would love to kill the sim card. They have numerous patents around technologies that will enable the SIM card to become software based. http://www.nfcworld.com/2011/11/09/311213/apple-patents-sim-... The carriers won't want this at all. They are trying to move payments from a card (with a chip) to another card (with a very similar chip i.e. the SIM) but this feels pointless to me. The SIM and the plastic payment card have had their day.

While an interesting read, its pure idealism on the part of the author.

For SIM cards to die as the author imagines the carriers would have to accept that in the future they nothing more than dumb data pipes. This would be excellent news for all consumers.

The US carriers have spent billions in marketing and lobbying to avoid becoming dumb data pipes so they will not accept this future.

And until the US regulator wakes up and starts regulating the carriers, then the status quo will prevail.

I want a phone that tests network signal strength for each call-- and uses the best network each time. I might use Verizon in the morning, AT&T at noon, and Sprint in the afternoon, depending upon how many real bars the phone is getting. For each Latitude/Longitude the carriers should have a realtime +/- score of how well they support that area.

I read that iPads in France let you choose the 3G network during the first boot. Sounds silimar to what the author is proposing. If anybody has a screenshot of that screen, please share. http://store.apple.com/fr/browse/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad/...

not practical. sim card is like our citizen id card. digitalize all you want, but we must always keep a physical card.

When you go to select the list of carriers on your phone as you propose, your phone will only be able to show carriers for which it can tranceive. It's not like they all share the same spectrum.

Furthermore, switching numbers and accounts, and transferring them to other phones could be made more complex.

In Australia, you must provide ID to purchase a SIM card. Whether it is pre-paid or post-paid. It is illegal to sell a SIM anonymously. I guess this is for law enforcement reasons, and that they wouldn't like to lose the ability to match a SIM with a citizen quickly and easily.

On a batch of 17 new phones rolled out about 30 days ago, we have had 3 iPhone users report problems that were tracked down to faulty/failed SIMs and one 'regular' SIM has failed in another phone - so I'm rather wishing SIM cards wouldn't keep dying!

This is already here with WiFi networks and VoIP systems (e.g. Skype). You can log in to Skype from any phone and your calls will be billed to your account. You can even log in to Skype on your friend's phone or you can choose another VoIP provider.

Hmmmm. Here's my post from 9 days ago : http://ragmondocom.appspot.com/2012/03/Who-needs-SIM-cards - I propose virtual downloadable SIM cards....

NLIps says it below - and I agree - the problem I see with this 'virtual sim' is that it is less secure.

Not if you use the same ssl certification authority mechanism that browsers use (obviously with some improvements to avoid common pitfalls). In fact, I would argue that it would be more secure (with revocation lists etc etc). Gone are the days that your phone can't do rapid handshaking / crypto etc etc.

Mr. Birman's argument is so idiotic that he looks like a shill for telcos.

Apple already have a patent for a virtual SIM card: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/apple_sim_patent/

I hear Apple and patents have a good track-record of ending up as standardized, reusable technology. A very good track, record indeed.

If this has been already patented by the Cupertino-based patent-troll, it is by definition doomed as a standard.

One additional issue is certain countries (eg: India) require a photographic ID, etc before they issue a SIM. This is becoming a larger issue in Europe and elsewhere.

IMHO the original posts and many of the comments are mixing up very different and somewhat unrelated issues.

Issue #1 The SIM card, as a piece of plastic used to identify your phone number and mobile operator, is indeed pre-historic technology. It's quite unbelievable that we're still using such a system in 2012. Unless I'm missing something, what a SIM card does could easily be done in software and this is part of what the OP is suggesting. I don't think that there is any doubt that the SIM card, as a data / identity storage system should be retired.

Issue #2 The issue of operator-issued mobile phones being locked to that specific operator is unrelated to whether or not the phone uses a SIM card. A phone can be locked to a specific operator, regardless of whether or not it uses a SIM card. In many countries, operators lock all their phones, meaning that you can't use a SIM card from any other operators in your phone.

If you live in a country where all phones are sold unlocked or where phones can be unlocked after a certain period of time, it's almost certainly because mobile phone operators are being forced by law to do so. Not because the phones use SIM cards.

So the freedom to switch between operators at any time isn't a technical issue linked to SIM cards. It's just a matter of whether or not operators can legally prevent you to do it. If operators can legally lock their phone, they'll obviously do it. Why wouldn't they?

It's worth noting that if you want an unlocked phone, you can always just buy it straight from manufacturer - there's nothing that forces you to buy a phone from an operator (apart from the price, but I'll touch on that later). So this issue is actually already solved - it's just that many people don't think their freedom to switch between operators is worth the upfront cost.

Issue #3 Being tied to a long contract and not being able to switch between operators and plans at anytime is another unrelated issue. But then, it's a pain you choose to have. There's nothing that forces you to sign up for a contract. Most operators offer pay-as-you-go plans with no contracts. In the UK for example, well over 50% of the population is on pay-as-you-go (or was the last time I looked) so pay-as-you-go can definitely work.

Obviously, operators much prefer when you sign up for a contract. Just like tech startups go crazy for subscription business models - it's nice to get money automatically every month. So they try to trick people into signing up for long contracts by offering subsidised phones. And many people fall for that.

What it all comes down to. Most, if not all these problems, arise because of the perception by people in most countries that mobile phones should be free or reasonably cheap. People don't find it a problem to spend £600 on a laptop. But tell them they have to spend £600 to buy a new phone and they freak out. This is despite the fact that many people do the same thing on their phone as they do on their laptop and use their phones a lot more than their laptop.

It's this way of thinking that results in far too many people signing up for long contracts with operators, allowing operators to subject them to their every will. Changing this perception and making people buy mobile phones in the same way as they buy laptops (i.e. without subsidies and straight from the manufacturer) is what we would need to really change the statu quo. Whether or not phones use SIM card is merely a small technical detail (but one I'd love to see fixed nonetheless).

> The SIM card, as a piece of plastic used to identify your phone number and mobile operator, is indeed pre-historic technology.

I highly doubt so. SIM cards are hardware tokens, which securely hold cryptographic keys — are those things obsolete or pre-historic?

They're holding a shared encryption key (so-called Ki) but never reveal it directly. This is the point of SIM cards.

SIM cards could (and, I believe, were) implemented in software, but such implementations reduce security, usability or both.

(Yes, nowadays, I believe, almost no operator would tell you what Ki is recorded on your SIM card, so you won't be able to clone the card. But that's a completely another issue.)

Ya man, fuck economics.

A better fight would be to push for 802.22 (super-wifi) broadband ISP's. Cell networks are obviously going to have a hissy-fit when any competition to their 3G and 4G oligopolies get tumbled over by superior technology. Due to the corruption of US politics I seriously doubt this will ever see the day of light.

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/08/07/ieee-completes-62-mile-s...

This seems crazy. Business are built to make money not to be logical. This would make customer happy, but I think that aspect is secondary to making guaranteed money. Plus if we lock people in this way it would make it hard for new smaller companies to come in like a Metro. They are smaller and cheaper, but we should give bigger companies control over if they can compete. I don't dislike big companies, but I know they aren't good or evil also. They are greedy as they should be.

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