Qualcomm Wants To Replace eSIMs With iSIMs, Has the First Certified SoC (arstechnica.com) 64
Here's an interesting bit of news out of Mobile World Congress: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as the "world's first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)." ArsTechnica: What the heck is an iSIM? Didn't we just go through a SIM card transition with eSIM? We did, but iSIM is better than eSIM. We'll explain, but the short answer is that iSIM is the next step in the continual march to reduce the size of SIM cards. [...] eSIMs are still a chip taking up space on your motherboard, and that's not ideal if you want to squeeze every square millimeter of space out of a phone. The next shrinking step is iSIM -- an Integrated Subscriber Identity Module. Rather than a chip on the motherboard, iSIMs are integrated directly onto the SoC. SoC (system on a chip) integration is the technology that makes smartphones possible. Instead of a thousand little chips for things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, modem, and a bunch of other things, everything gets packed into one single do-everything piece of silicon.
Individual chips require more space and power thanks to having to make motherboard traces to connect everything and having to deal with chip packages. Building everything in one chip, with the tiniest transistors you can muster, is the cheapest and most space-efficient and power-efficient way to do things, and now SIM cards are going to disappear into that big block of stuff. iSIMs will be measured in fractions of a millimeter, and as part of the SoC, they will continually shrink every year as chip process nodes hit ever-smaller nm measurements. It sounds like this is the endgame for SIM technology, and besides helping out phones, will be great for evermore space-constrained devices like smartwatches.
Individual chips require more space and power thanks to having to make motherboard traces to connect everything and having to deal with chip packages. Building everything in one chip, with the tiniest transistors you can muster, is the cheapest and most space-efficient and power-efficient way to do things, and now SIM cards are going to disappear into that big block of stuff. iSIMs will be measured in fractions of a millimeter, and as part of the SoC, they will continually shrink every year as chip process nodes hit ever-smaller nm measurements. It sounds like this is the endgame for SIM technology, and besides helping out phones, will be great for evermore space-constrained devices like smartwatches.
eSIM Fan (Score:3, Informative)
Been a big fan of the eSIM and down with this further change. It's been brilliant when traveling. I pop up the Airalo app on my phone, select the country and buy the data package I want. Even has regional packages if you're traveling to several countries. It's worked nicely and means not having to find a little stand selling a SIM every time you go to a new country and the challenges that can come with getting it loaded (for instance, in Honduras the app the service required was in Spanish-only).
att will push for an way to lock the sim so pay ro (Score:1)
att will push for an way to lock the sim so you are forced to pay roaming or there international day pass
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eSIM has been out for several years and AT&T hasn't done such. In fact, in most cases you can get your phone unlocked (if it's not from the factory) easier now with AT&T than you could in the past. Go to their website, say you're traveling internationally, and they'd unlock it. It was super simple back when I had AT&T.
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Just don't buy your phone from ATT then?
Re: eSIM Fan (Score:2)
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Certainly. eSIM is also great for switching carriers. Went from AT&T to T-Mobile without having to go and get a SIM. Completed the move online in minutes.
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Some carriers make SIM cards a profit center too. If you want a new SIM card they charge $10-20 for a new one. If you ask really nicely sometimes you get them for free, but a lot of the times they want you to pay up.
eSIMs are just a QR code you scan...
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Some carriers make SIM cards a profit center too. If you want a new SIM card they charge $10-20 for a new one. If you ask really nicely sometimes you get them for free, but a lot of the times they want you to pay up.
Ting charged me $1 for my new SIM in Sep 2021 and I got it the next day via FexEx.
My Flex plan -- $10/month unlimited talk/text + $5/GB 5G data -- costs me $17.33/month. I don't use much cell data, never more than ~100MB/month, it's almost all WiFi data usage for me.
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eSIMs are just a QR code you scan...
Coudl be worse... Here in Canada, Telus charges you $20 for an eSim, which is just a piece of plastic(!!) with the qr-code printed on it. And it's single use, so if you fuck up an dde-activate the one in your phone, you have to pay $20 for another one. Ask me how I know.
That said, I use the eSim for my primary carrier. It's still easier to grab a local physical SIM when arriving at a foreign airport than it is to find an eSIM qr-code. So local SIM goes in physical slot, eSim stays with my primary carrier.
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Your traveling use case is much smaller than people just buying new phones and swapping Sims without having to log into anything or run apps
It's easier to scan a QR code than it is to fuck around with a SIM tray. No the use case you present isn't a benefit to the SIM card, it's just another example of something silly we do hampered by an out of date technology.
eSIMs make it far easier to provision a phone than a SIM card. Bonus points if your SIM card doesn't actually provision the phone settings correctly making you either take a trip to the phone store or trawl through the online manuals looking for the correct USSD code to dial to restart th
Re: eSIM Fan (Score:1)
Re: eSIM Fan (Score:2)
I have looked into these things...discovered you don't get a phone number and voice line.
Why the hell not?
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Depends. In my case, I didn't want a phone number or voice line. I wanted to set my phone to use my own phone number for sending texts, but data through the Airalo service (which is with the big carriers in the area you're traveling). Worked great for that. Meant people could still text me fine at the same number, rather than in the past when I've traveled and suddenly your friends are getting texts from a strange foreign number. I'd think there'd be an option to get a phone number if you wanted it. There's
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Who the hell modded you flamebait. This post is entirely on point. eSIMs are great as you can provision your phone for a destination from an online supplier before you leave. No more of this trying to find a SIM card shop when you land and hoping for the best, or getting screwed by the dodgy over priced rip-off artists in the "${country}cell" stand at the airport. No more ejecting your SIM card and having the tiny thing drop out, or having to purposefully remove it and store it somewhere hoping you don't lo
SIMS (Score:4, Funny)
Next up is vSIM (Score:2)
Just make it virtual. Data and computation are the only things a SIM can possibly do, therefor any Turing complete environment can simulate it. Of course the requirement of having a SIM at all is an artificial constraint imposed by GSM and LTE. Those of us in the US were using pre-LTE CDMA phones on Sprint and you only had to read a number off the back to the operator and they'd activate your account. The eSIM and iSIM are stepping stones to same provisioning workflow, and offers little more than what a TPM
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I've discovered that for example my phone's hardware supports eSIM but because I have a US model, even though it was unlocked the day I bought it as a new device, the very fact that it's a US model means that the eSIM capability was disabled in software. My physical SIM (carried over from an older device) started having issues that I thought I'd be able to resolve by copying it to the eSIM, only to find out I can't use that function.
Why? No earthly idea.
Phones in the US are fucking stupid, man.
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What manufacturer or model of phone, out of curiosity?
Weird that they've gone the exact opposite direction of Apple who've removed the physical SIM tray from iPhone 14 models in the US. (Non-US models still have a physical SIM tray.)
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This is a Samsung S20+ 5G. Apparently the international models support eSIM but none of the US versions do.
On the other hand, I generally approve of things that are the opposite of Apple. I'd give up on telephone service entirely before I'd accept an iOS device.
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I'd give up on telephone service entirely before I'd accept an iOS device.
Uh, ok. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
When the operator declines to transfer service (Score:3, Informative)
Those of us in the US were using pre-LTE CDMA phones on Sprint and you only had to read a number off the back to the operator and they'd activate your account.
Either that, or the operator would decline to activate your account. I seem to remember this happening for handsets purchased anywhere but a Sprint store. The more integrated the SIM becomes, the less expectation end users will have of being able to transfer service without resistance from an operator.
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Sounds like we need a law or the FCC to step in and declate companies can't do that. It already gone done with phone unlocks, this seems a natural extensin of that:
https://www.fcc.gov/general/ce... [fcc.gov]
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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the technology doesn't matter. it's all open to abuse. When I read an IMEA back to Sprint it didn't cost me a dime, and it took only a few minutes to make the call and connect to a person. The operation today could be easily automated with a self-help webpage or automated voice system.
Try to buy a prepaid SIM in Canada and see what an unpleasant carrier market really looks like. Travelling internationally is a huge pain in the ass unless "international" means only Western Europe.
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you only had to read a number off the back to the operator
You had to talk to an operator? How backwards.
No card (Score:3)
What mechanism does this use to protect you from someone abruptly changing your phone provider to a scam provider that charges outrageous rates?
At least with the SIM card, you need to physically insert a card into your phone before the service changes.
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the carrier needs physical access to the phone to setup the eSIM. You can't switch carriers, they're all locked as far as I know.
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Huh? Is carrier locking still a thing in your country? I thought most places made that illegal in the early 00s.
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Carrier locking still affects hundreds of million people in the world. A regulatory body in the US, the FCC, acknowledges this in the first question of their FAQ [fcc.gov]
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So "around the world" and "they are all locked" are two very different statements. I haven't come across a carrier locked device in decades. Incidentally carrier locking has *NOTHING* to do with your SIM card or eSIM.
The SIM card is not the mechanism used for carrier locking.
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the carrier needs physical access to the phone to setup the eSIM. You can't switch carriers, they're all locked as far as I know.
This is sort of correct. The carrier's profile has to be installed on the device by the device maker, but many device makers install profiles for approximately all the carriers, and it's even possible for the device maker to remotely push a profile, if they have built infrastructure for that. Once the profile is available, downloading your account data can be done remotely. Obviously your device needs some network connection for this to work, so you generally have to connect to Wifi.
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It's even harder for someone to change your provider as they need acces to your phone AND your PIN. If anything it's more secure than the SIM as you can't easily prevent someone from swapping your SIM.
But regardless I don't get the "changing your phone provider to a scam provider that charges outrageous rates" attack, let's say the attack succeeds and now your calls and data get charged to the attacker Eve Mallory that has a contract with Nigerian1 provider. So what? Eve gets a huge bill?
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What mechanism does this use to protect you from someone abruptly changing your phone provider to a scam provider that charges outrageous rates?
The phone has to make the request. It has to be unlocked, and the process requires user action (you have to scan a QR code from within the eSIM provision settings from the phone, you can't just accidently get QR-hijacked).
SIM becomes more of a MAC address? (Score:3)
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No. The IMEI is (sort of) your MAC address. But as I've posted elsewhere, SIMs are a 90s technology and are no longer required either real or virtual. Assymetric encryption could and should be used instead for network connection.
Re:SIM becomes more of a MAC address? (Score:4, Informative)
The point of the SIM module (or key in the case of an eSIM or iSIM) is to have something the carrier is in exclusive control of. It is very hard to brute force these credentials. Putting them in general device memory would break that security.
"Size counts, and other things Shanen's wife says" (Score:1)
Instead of a thousand little chips for things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, modem, and a bunch of other things, everything gets packed into one single do-everything piece of silicon.
Right but a thousand little chips is whimsicially overstating things, it's a handful, and the scale of integration for all of these components is already very high. Going from eSIM to iSIM makes a difference, but not big enough that I think any of us will notice any drastic change in a phone's form factor. (eSIM chips are already 5x6mm)
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The journalist thinks isolation caps are chips.
5x6 is fairly enormous. It's probably got a bazillion pins for some reason, that all need to be routed too. I was surprised that esims were actually separate chips and not integrated into the baseband chip from the start.
We don't need any kind of SIM (Score:3, Interesting)
Every phone has an IMEI number which is all thats needed to identify it to the network. Then asymetric encryption allows keys to be exchanged and initial authorisation to be stored in the phone memory or sent to the network. SIMs were a great idea in the 90s when phone and network tech wasn't up to doing this so a physical hardware token was needed, but it sure as hell is now especially since a phone is simply a computer that needs to connect to a network. We no longer use dongles with laptops so no need for SIMs, virtual or otherwise, with phones.
Unless your carrier refuses to transfer service (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally, a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) came on a card the size of a credit card, for use in briefcase phones and car phones. A cellular subscriber could, for example, rent a car and insert the subscriber's SIM into the car's SIM slot to use its phone, then rent a different car and insert the subscriber's SIM into that car's SIM slot to use its phone. As phones became smaller, a smaller cutout version of the card became common. It retained its function of letting a subscriber instantly transfer service to another device without resistance from the carrier.
eSIM and iSIM take us back to the CDMA2000 days when subscribers could expect a carrier to decline to activate service on any phone model not on the carrier's curated allowlist. The carrier expected subscribers to obtain handset and service as a set: when you change carriers, you change handsets.
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eSIM and iSIM take us back to the CDMA2000 days when subscribers could expect a carrier to decline to activate service on any phone model not on the carrier's curated allowlist.
No. Lack of regulation of your phone providers does that. There's nothing about a physical SIM card that prevents companies from doing that now. Your phone is already completely uniquely identified in make, model, and IMEI to any carrier, and can be blocked on that basis by any carrier.
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Carrier locking and eSIM/iSIM are different issues. If the phone is unlocked the carrier cannot block use of an eSIM any more than they can a physical SIM.
Normals cannot understand or care. (Score:3)
It bears relentless reminding that techies are NOT normal and are a microscopic portion of the phone buying public. That means carriers can get away with anything in the US and almost anything overseas.
This will sell many handsets.
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I don't want this (Score:2)
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"So if anyone can move around a iSIMâ - how did you come to this conclusion? If anything people are complaining about being HARDER to move to another phone! Basically the same chip that was in the SIM went on the motherboard for eSIM and then in the Snapdragon SoC now.
competition (Score:3)
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since most smaller players don't offer them.
??? Really? I found exactly the opposite. It's the larger companies that insist on sending you SIM cards while small providers, the kind who have little more than an online website and customer support line that redirects to the cheapest call centre in India are the ones who offer eSIMs.
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Hmm.. I dual SIM on my iPhone 12. My primary/home carrier is an eSIM, leaving my tray empty. When I travel to a foreign country (which I do frequently for work) I grab a new SIM at the airport on arrival, and slap it in the tray. No muss no fuss. My primary stays active, but as the secondary, and I don't use it for anything other than seeing who calls me on my home number. If they do call me, I'll contact them back through other means that don't incur roaming fees.
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eSIM is bad, I bet iSIM will be worse (Score:2, Insightful)
With SIM cards you have the freedom to pull them out of one phone - may be out of batter, dead, etc, put them in another and carry on. Even quickly for diagnostic reasons. And this is free.
With eSIMs, the providers have the excuse and the ability to charge you with the process - I know as my own provider charges you for an eSIM.
And then, it's impossible to fix issue as I said. E.g. a friend of mine traveled from the US to Greece for a project for a few months. She got a brand new Pixel 7 Pro with her and pa
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Apple, at least, has made this reasonably painless as of iOS 16. You can transfer the eSIM between phones without having to contact your carrier. For security reasons, though, I think it has to be on phones that you own, and are signed in to your account, which is fair enough.
Personally, I use the eSIM for my primary carrier connection, then use the otherwise empty tray for a local SIM while travelling. Pretty easy to pick up a cheap SIM with a reasonable plan upon arrival at an airport.
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I'm generally educated in hardware and software (Score:2)
However I've never bothered digging into the the specific chips on a modern mobile phone. I have assumptions made based on modems, DACs, RAM, CPU, etc...
I honestly didn't know an e-sim wasn't already an i-sim, or vice/versa. Not sure this article is that big of a deal to the public at large outside of very phonecentric people. Just another "miniaturization and chip combining continues" story. E-sim was a big story - that involved the user and needing to keep track of something physical, past that, the u
lock-in (Score:2)
So this giant step forward will lock you into a communications vendor. I've heard that song before. Time to change the beat.
-- Mr. E. Zorg
No need (Score:2)
I see no need of eSIM or iSIM, but I found very convenient the existence of physical SIM cards: buy a new phone, just move the SIM from one device to another, switch providers, just take the new SIM and put it in your phone, out of battery and need to make a call urgently, borrow a phone and move the SIM, travel abroad, buy a pre-paid SIM, put it in the second slot.