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Comment by raron | Hacker News Reader

> The major advantage is now that the expensive and time-consuming part of provisioning a new mobile service (sending out a physical SIM card)

I don't know, choosing service package, signing paperwork, identifying and other KYC stuff (tens of minutes) for me was always much more time-consuming than the few seconds of reading the barcode(?) from a new SIM card and giving it to the customer (or putting it into an automatically addressed envelope).

I can't see any advantage of eSIMs except that it makes harder to change providers what they of course really like.

(Anyways the security of the whole PTSN is a joke and publications about cracking cell networks, why SIM cards are even a thing? I would suspect an customer-id@service-provider.country and a password would work, too. Maybe with a zero-knowledge password proof.)

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> I can't see any advantage of eSIMs

They are incredibly handy when you are traveling abroad, you don't speak the local language fluently, you want cheap data, you don't want to study 100 different prepaid plans from 10 different local primary and MVNO carriers to figure out the best offer, you don't want to wait for the shops to open because your flight landed late at night, and you don't want to scan your passport and send it to the carrier for verification and wait for hours for approval (yes, in many countries, KYC is required even for prepaid SIMs). I've lived that experience and I can't say I miss it.

Yeah, basically people here think that their experience is the only experience there is with phones. I wager not that many people are actually physically going to stores in many markets anymore like this commenter, and definitely next to nobody is switching their SIM cards literally every month like a sibling commenter is doing, but for people like me who live and travel abroad, eSIMs have been great.

shoutout to airalo for the esim experience on travelling. A great marketplace. Great choices. I can book an esim from home country and activate the esim on arrival at the destination when over wifi.

Really? I live in Japan, eSIMs made it very easy for me to switch carriers 3 times when I was shopping. Just had to click the “agree” checkbox in the ts and cs for each carrier when I switched, provide the transfer code (which is always in an easy to find place in their management dashboards), and then plug that into the form when signing up for the new carrier. Then my butt did not have to budge from my couch as the eSIM was provisioned and my old service was cancelled automatically. Definitely beat schlepping it to the physical stores of each carrier in ye olde times.

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