What eSIMs really are about: the industry fighting back against regulations restricting their anti-competitive SIM and carrier locking.
eSIMs are about is stripping owners of the control they have via pulling the physical SIM and putting it in another phone.
As a result, SIM locking does not have any benefit to the providers anymore and they stopped doing that.
That said, I have used eSIMs for years now and there is not much of a real benefit outside dual SIM in phones that only have one physical SIM slot (like iPhone). When first starting a subscription it's faster, because you don't have to wait until the SIM card comes through snail mail. But after that there is always the anxiety after switching to a new phone whether the eSIM transition goes well. With most providers you have to request the eSIM through their app on your new phone, you get a second factor code on your old phone (where the SIM is still active), then an eSIM is installed on the new phone, but only activated after you remove the eSIM from the old phone. Sometimes you get an error in the middle of the process and it's not clear whether the migration is complete or not.
Another issue is that if somehow the screen of your phone is destroyed, it's hard to move the eSIM to a replacement. While with a physical card you just pop it out and put it in your new phone.
I feel like people with these comments don't realise that in many mobile markets carriers that do lockin don't do it via SIM cards, they do it via IMEI number locks on the phone. So even if you have a physical SIM card, you put it in another phone and it just doesn't work.
My carrier straight up doesn't support esim transfer as in moving the esim from one phone to an other, you have to renew / order a new one (as if you'd lost a physical sim basically).
It does not take too long once you find out you have to do that, and hunt down how to do it, but it's stressful, annoying, and dumb.
I bought a bunch of cellular iPads off Amazon (“renewed”, aka refurbished) for my business. I tried out a few IoT cellular providers and the first one used regular SIM cards and they worked just fine. The second carrier (that I ultimately went with) used eSIM and while most my iPads joined up without issue I had 7 of them refuse to add the eSIM. While carriers aren’t allowed to lock iPads SIM they _are_ allowed to lock them to only work with their eSIM.
AT&T was the culprit here and you can find multiple mentions of this practice on their forums which appeared to be the only way to get help on this issue. Post a new topic, wait for customer support to come along and PM you, then ask for your iPads to be unlocked (EUICC).
AT&T Forum support ultimately told me “those iPads aren’t in our system, there is no lock on them”. I tried calling in (BTW, they won’t even talk to you unless you are a customer of theirs which, thankfully?, I was for my personal line) and spent hours on the phone with them only to be told the same thing. I want to be clear, I spent over 4 hours across multiple calls where I was told different things but ultimately told “there is nothing we can do”.
At this point I called Apple (Apple Business Manager) where I was able to talk to a real person within <1 min of dialing (normally I spent 10min in AT&T phone tree hell) and they confirmed “this is an EUICC/eSIM lock on the device by AT&T. ONLY AT&T can remove the lock”. I cannot rave enough about how easy it was to talk to ABM and how knowledgeable the person was, not to mention how they were easy to understand and immediately understood what I was asking. It was a stark difference from AT&T.
I called back into AT&T and just kept pushing until someone said they would do it and it’d be fixed in 24 hours. It was not. I had a couple more rounds with AT&T, each with 24-72 hours promises that it would be fixed. This dragged on for _weeks_.
Finally, as a hail mary before I attempted to return the troublesome iPads to Amazon (which was what AT&T support kept suggesting I do), I filed an FCC complaint and in less than 3 days AT&T reached out to me (no more automated systems) and released the lock on all my iPads. The same lock they swore didn’t exist, for iPads they swore were not “in their system”.
So yeah, there’s a case of anti-lock in being subverted with eSIM and the hell I had to go through to get it fixed.
If there is a specific law forbidding carriers to put any kind of block on a device using only physical SIM, but not if eSIM, I'll be interested to know that law. And if that's the case, wouldn't it be obvious that because eSIM is a relatively new thing, the law is just lagging behind, not that eSIM inherently a bad thing?
Technically it’s not a SIM lock (also called carrier lock) in the traditional sense, AT&T calls it the carrier visibility or carrier reveal program.
It’s a BS name because it doesn’t just hide other carriers from the carrier select screen, it also actively prevents eSIM activation via QR code etc. And if you need help from AT&T CS 9/10 have never heard of this term.
For all intents and purposes it’s basically just an eSIM specific SIM lock.
But you (and anyone reading this that runs into the same issue) can use the “carrier visibility/reveal” terminology to get the issue resolved faster in the future.
Yes, I forgot to mention that but I did know it at the time (I still have a doc with all those terms in it that I used when talking to the reps) and yes, almost no one knows what you are talking about. Even when I got someone to “put in a request” (which didn’t work) they sounded skeptical about what they were putting in a request for. It didn’t feel like they knew what I was talking about.
The only people that did use that term or understand it (other than the rep that contacted me after the FCC complaint) were the forum support but they told me the iPads weren’t in their system.
I'm more asking about cases where using an esim means the existing regulations don't apply, not instances of some shit company disobeying regulation until the regulator gets involved.
I’m not in the US and superficially, it seems like esim and physical sim don’t differ that much.
Unfortunately we have to suffer for a long time before regulation follows, if ever.
Then regulation follows and we get cookie banners sometimes.
In the meantime, don't buy esims. Nothing but drawbacks.
The root cause of the cookie banner problem was implementing third-party cookies in the first place. Regulation is like violence; in both that if it doesn't work you just need more, and that if you needed to resort to it you've already fucked up.
We can't wind the clock back and give Netscape a slap, or stop the operators from introducing SIM-lock on handsets. The next best thing is to fix it now, and yeah, sometimes the wheels have to turn slowly.
What else do you propose we do? Refuse to use mobile data? (Actually, doesn't seem like the worst idea.)