Apple Is Building Its Own Modem, Plays Long Game in Dropping Qualcomm
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Qualcomm is hardly cheap, but per-phone it's also hardly expensive. At one remove, this is a fight between two dogs with no up or downside for me as a consumer because in all likelihood Apple will keep prices high: It's seeking to reduce cost, not price.
If somebody has evidence the cost of Qualcomm IPR has influenced Apple pricing and we can expect a price drop, I'd love to understand it.
Moving upstream, is Apple going to take over the Qualcomm research function and start owning the IPR behind encoding and RF technology?
Wouldn't buying qualcomm have achieved the same outcome? Buying their IPR wholesale instead of retail? Thats what Google did with Motorola: bought the entire box, kept the three pokemon cards it liked (the retained IPR, a small amount), and sold the rest to Lenovo.
They want to lower costs but I’m sure they’ll also use this as an excuse to increase prices justified by all the investments.
Qualcomm’s special area of expertise is in cellular, not WiFi. And cellular is specced and regulated to the extreme. There’s nothing extra Apple can do that Qualcomm isn’t.
They can optimize, but they can’t revolutionize.
In the interim, a number of companies like Apple and Samsung are now offering Satellite based SOS Emergency Text services as a commercial reality, presumably straining the capabilities of the current modems to their capacity.
Cellular is specced and regulated to the extreme between the FCC/3GPP Standards, but working within those constraints you already have two viable D2D Satellite 4G companies rolling out commercial services for unmodified cellular devices - ASTS and Lynk - with Lynk already offering commercial services.
They could well be optimizing and revolutionizing in one go - particularly to support new paradigm shifts in the US Market Service provisionment.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240529554741/en/AST...
And if something doesn't work, the user is unlikely to blame Apple. They always blame the other guy.
So Apple seems to be one of the only companies that could plausibly homegrow a 5G modem, picking and choosing the parts of the protocol that they want to implement, and perhaps supporting only 5G instead of all the legacy protocols as a sort of "brave" stance.
At the very least, their development of such a program could induce their chip vendors to give a price break.
And esims are just a software/provisioning change for most mobile networks. Yet apple couldn't force it to happen.
Even now, 5 years on, esims aren't supported on most mobile networks outside the USA and many models of phone don't support them.
The esim thing is a little curious though, because it seems like that should be pretty easy for carriers to support, unlike for instance only supporting 5G. Maybe there's something I don't understand about esim implementation at the carrier level.
As an aside, though, esim is really a godsend when traveling. Instead of having to get a local SIM card somewhere and get that set up, there's a bunch of easy-to-use services where you just install an app on your phone and buy a temporary-use esim while you're traveling in a particular country. You can buy the esim beforehand, and then switch to it when your plane lands.
You need to keep in mind that carriers have near-zero actual engineering capability. They're a marketing & financing operation with a very small technical skeleton crew, with most of the actual network management outsourced to their equipment vendor.
5G is relatively "simple" to support - you give a ton of money to your equipment vendor, they give you new equipment to install and it's done. The vendor happily does all the work for a fee and they can do it fine because it's not their first rodeo.
eSIM on the other hand ties into the account & billing management software which is custom for each carrier (and it's a "big ball of mud" of crappy Java accumulated over 2 decades). The vendor can't help here - each carrier has their own ball of mud, so there is no economies of scale possible here.
5G is completely transparent to the "big ball of mud". The differing bits are all handled by the vendor-provided equipment, the ball of mud doesn't know/care. 5G doesn't change any fundamentals - the big ball of mud can treat it as a 2G network. You've still got phone numbers, CDRs, etc.
eSIM is a fundamental change though. You go from physical SIMs that must be created & registered in advance, and then linked to an account by some privileged user (CS agent or in-store employee), to "SIMs" that can be created out of thin air and registered by the user themselves. This requires new functionality in the "big ball of mud". The security profile also changes - with physical SIMs the security is provided by the privileged user who is supposed to check the legitimacy of any SIM swap/registration request. With eSIMs this is done online by the user, so there needs to be additional security checks, fraud protection, etc that the existing system (which so far was pretty low stakes as no security-critical action could be done online) suddenly needs to be hardened to support.
This would be no big deal for a dedicated engineering team at any decent tech company or even startup, but these companies are as far away from "tech/startup" as you can imagine, and no competent engineer would want to work there for the terrible pay/conditions/pervasive mediocrity that's in such companies. It's the same situation as with legacy banks still not being able to catch up to the functionality & user experience offered by modern "challenger banks" despite having orders of magnitude more resources and capital.
How about MVNOs and eSIMs? Is this something where MVNOs might have an easier time since they're smaller/newer companies than the big incumbents? I've only done the travel eSIM thing once, but it seemed like they were using small MVNOs rather than any big carriers when I visited North America this way.
It depends if they're building new towers or just upgrading existing ones. Doing a like-for-like swap can presumably be done entirely by the vendor, setting up new sites indeed needs a bit of work, so maybe whatever little technical staff they have handles that (or maybe even that is outsourced too).
> How about MVNOs and eSIMs?
When it comes to MVNOs it depends whether the MVNO runs (at least parts of) their own infrastructure or is just white-labelling the upstream carrier's one.
In the former case they can indeed do it, but the company culture challenges still apply. You need to hire and retain good engineers, something I'm not aware of any telecom company actually prioritizing. Meaning they too will eventually end up with a ball of mud in a few years.
In the latter case they're just reselling the upstream turd with a bit of polish. If the upstream ball of mud can't manage eSIMs, they can't either.
> I've only done the travel eSIM thing
I wouldn't recommend relying on these. You're getting bottom-of-the-barrel capacity that (even if it works) is so slow that you'd be lucky to even use up half your data cap. You are always roaming and your data is tunnelled through what feels like some dial-up modem in some shady warehouse. These are a scam.
I've used them quite a lot around Europe and once or twice in Africa (and even locally, when I didn't have an unlimited data plan and used all of my allotted data by my carrier and it was easier to just buy an eSIM), and my experience has always been pretty good.
Note that I am talking about these Airalo, Nomad, etc eSIMs sold online, not eSIMs sold directly by the carrier themselves (the latter would generally be as good as the carrier's own prepaid offering).
>I've tried a few of these and can rarely pull more than a few megabits per second (in a location where a carrier's own SIM pulls 150+).
That seems.. fine? If you're traveling and your use case is checking google maps, or logging into airbnb to pull up your booking, you don't need 150 Mb/s of speed and low latency. The only case where it might be dodgy is if you're doing voip calls or watching streaming videos, but why are you doing those things on vacation? Sure, it'd be nice to have a local sim with low latency and high speeds, that's often much more expensive than esims and/or comes with more hassle (eg. KYC or having to pick up the sim in-person).
Besides some annoyances (try to switch phone while your plan is on esim. I hope you dont reset your old phone before you transferred the esim to your new phone), esim really works.
This makes it sounds like the way AppleCare works is incompatible with eSIMs, as I’m required to reset my old phone before they’re able to pull out the replacement handset and allow me to activate it.
For physical SIM it’s really easy. I take the SIM card out and put it in my new device. It takes five minutes and four of those are spent looking for a paperclip. Since I have access to my number immediately, I can set up important things like Google account and banking apps immediately that require SMS 2FA to move to a new device.
For eSIM, if the answer is contact customer support, then how? My old phone is dead and my new phone doesn’t have a SIM. I have to go out of my way to find a Wifi network (for billions of people their phone is their only internet connection), borrow someone else’s phone, or buy a temporary eSIM.
Then what do I tell customer support? In most of the world SIM cards are not tied to any contract, you just buy it in cash. How do I prove that the eSIM in my old phone is mine if I can’t use the phone that the eSIM is in?
If the answer is “when you bought the eSIM you get a code that you have to keep safe”, then nobody is going to do that over multiple years.
So I suspect the answer is that I just have to buy a new SIM and say goodbye to my old phone number. This is incredibly inconvenient given that the software industry has decided that phone numbers are persistent 2FA passwords that never change. If I need to get into my Google account then I may need the SIM. Because of this I will end up paying to repair a phone that I have already replaced, just to extract the eSIM!
eSIM seems like it was designed by someone from the US who has no idea how the rest of the world uses phones, particularly the developing world.
> eSIM seems like it was designed by someone from the US
eSIM was designed by committee to allow carriers more control over switching and/or moving SIMs. Carriers see the ability to easily move a physical SIM outside of their control as a problem. eSIM is the solution, putting them back into the loop and ensuring they can do obnoxious things like charge fees on issuing a (one-time-use!) eSIM QR code (the fee made sense back then as it involved delivery of a physical SIM, but now it's just pure racket).
Every carrier has already had the ability to block moving physical SIMS too, for many decades now. (AT&T in the US literally did used to block physical SIM swaps, for ages)
eSIMs don't actually give carriers any more-or-less control over SIM movement than they already had before.
eSIMs allow them to sneak in that control as part of the move to eSIMs and get consumers to accept it, even though technically they already had this control previously.
You open your web-browser on anything with service (your laptop / desktop / toaster / Nintendo Wii U / whatever), go to "insert-my-carrier-here.com", login, and click "move eSIM". You type in the IMEI/eSIM ICCID number on the back of your new phone (or in the 'settings' menu on the new phone), and wait a few minutes. Your plan moves over as-is, same with your telephone number, etc.
Yes, it's steps, and it takes time, and in a remote situation, those are real barriers with real trickiness. But it's no more tricky than saying, "I smashed my laptop, how do I check my gmail now?".
> My old phone is dead and my new phone doesn’t have a SIM. I have to go out of my way to find a Wifi network (for billions of people their phone is their only internet connection)
Ok, sure. Yes, eSIM requires you have a new device to connect with. But other than that, it's not terribly tricky. (You can do it via your carriers mobile app, or you can transfer via any web browser, you don't have to get to a store or get a new sim card, its usually free to transfer an eSIM, etc).
> Because of this I will end up paying to repair a phone that I have already replaced, just to extract the eSIM!
That's not really how eSIMs work. No one regular person would ever need to do that. (If you are already in a phone repair place, you already have everything you need to transfer your service to a new eSIM in ~5 minutes anyway).
> eSIM seems like it was designed by someone from the US who has no idea how the rest of the world uses phones, particularly the developing world.
Well, I suppose that's fair (in that, half of the carriers in the US already did service provisioning without SIM cards at all on legacy non-GSM networks for a decade, so for them eSIM is entirely upgrade with no downside).
But as someone who actually uses eSIMs, the only real annoyance I've seen on eSIMs, is that US Cellular Carriers often lock it down to postpaid only or prepaid carriers don't know how to support it properly, so changing eSIMs on prepaid/mvnos is still a huge pain. (For example, US Mobile's eSIM support didn't reliably work for me on Verizon, but Visible's eSIM support did work on Verizon, despite literally being the same eSIM, same device, same network). Or they put artificial delays on provisioning, so it takes an hour for the network to "update" the "profile" or whatnot. So, while the technology works fine, carriers artificially make it kind of a pain.
But that's not SIM vs eSIM's fault at all, carriers also made switching physical SIMs a huge pain for many years (AT&T used to device-lock SIM cards, for example, defeating the entire point of the card).
> Then what do I tell customer support?
Nothing? It's like saying, "if I want to check my gmail, what do I tell customer support when I telephone call in?". The question is kind of nonsensical. You wouldn't call customer support, the whole point of an eSIM is you no longer have to talk to customer support to transfer the SIM.
Is this even feasible? I thought 5G wasn't really usable outside urban environments because it has a lower range than 4G.
is this any different than any other major vendor? I can't imagine not testing against qualcomm (atheros) or intel's wifi implementation, for instance.
IIRC they did this as recently as last year. (Sorry if the article goes into this, I got paywalled)