Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

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Let’s say I drop my phone and it breaks. I buy a new phone or I have a spare device (e.g. old phone). How do I move my SIM to my new phone?

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.

A friend of mine went through this same scenario while abroad. In his case he actually did have the eSIM on a contract attached to his name, but the issue is that he couldn't get it reissued from abroad for security reasons and/or activating it from abroad wasn't possible (if he could get a Wi-Fi network VPN'd back to the UK it would've probably worked). It was a nightmare to sort out, and I believe he had to ultimately arrange a physical SIM getting delivered to a friend in his home country who then forwarded it to him.

> 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).

> Carriers see the ability to easily move a physical SIM outside of their control as a problem

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.

On Verion I get a text if any device on my plan has its sim changed. They can easily block them if they wanted to.

Maybe this was common in the US, but absolutely unheard of in Europe.

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.

> How do I move my eSIM to my new phone?

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.

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