There's no way killing SIM cards would be a good thing.
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.
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?
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.
It'd be awesome if there was an operator-netural, handset-neutral, multi-platform and secure cloud-based SMS sync service.
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.
Seems strange having a phone that even stores them individually and doesn't group my contact these days!
I think I've had the same SIM card for about 6-7 years now!
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.
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?
There HAS to be a better way than carrying around a legacy device.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
However, you still can't do data and voice at the same time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-95
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.
edit: here's a great comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_stan...
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)