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USA 3G sunset - swapping SIM could create headache
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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: Rick Law on July 21, 2021, 12:06:01 am ---In my opinion, eSIM rather missed the point of having a SIM at all.

Before this 4G era, the SIM is the portable "personality card" for your phone.  Inserting that card into a phone and that phone instantly becomes your phone.

--- End quote ---

I agree. But it gives more control to the operators, making you completely dependent on them for portability.

The customer was once king. These days are long gone.
Rick Law:
Yeah, the good old days of just a simple phone are gone...  I just want a simple voice-only phone, but even the new flip phones has all that damn junk loaded on it, none for my benefit but theirs...

I really do miss those good old days.
tooki:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on July 28, 2021, 05:03:48 pm ---
--- Quote from: Rick Law on July 21, 2021, 12:06:01 am ---In my opinion, eSIM rather missed the point of having a SIM at all.

Before this 4G era, the SIM is the portable "personality card" for your phone.  Inserting that card into a phone and that phone instantly becomes your phone.

--- End quote ---

I agree. But it gives more control to the operators, making you completely dependent on them for portability.

The customer was once king. These days are long gone.

--- End quote ---
LOL what? That’s the exact opposite of how things went. We used to be far MORE carrier-dependent than we are now.

Have you forgotten that for most of the history of telephony in most places, there was a single national monopolist for phone service? The customer was certainly not “king”.
Rick Law:
SIM vs eSIM (or no SIM) really is just half the equation.  SIM doesn't free the customer from carrier, however, it unlink the lock between the carrier and the phone hardware.  So one is tied to the carrier up-to but excluding the end point.

If I have carrier X's SIM, I can use that on any compatible phone.  So my phone choice is carrier independent.  However, eSIM (or no SIM) likely ties the phone hardware to the carrier and a specific phone.  So one is tied to the carrier up-to and including the end point.

I said "...likely ties the phone..." above because one can of course implement eSIM in such a way that it can be moved between phones, but I doubt that would be the typical implementation.  Besides, you have to "export" that eSIM first before you can use it on a different phone.  If the reason is because your phone took a bath at the beach and wont power up, you are as lost as no-SIM.
tooki:
I don’t disagree that the eSIM is less portable than a hardware SIM. But I was responding to the preposterous claim that “the customer was once king”.

Have you guys all forgotten what the pre-iPhone days of mobile carriers were like, in particular in USA? ATT (the old one on TDMA), Sprint and Verizon used nearly-proprietary hardware. (And remember Nextel, which literally used an entire proprietary mobile network standard?) Cingular and T-Mo were already GSM but locked down everything. Every carrier loaded custom firmware onto their devices to plaster their proprietary BS apps everywhere, defacing even excellent hardware. (I had an otherwise lovely Sony-Ericsson phone that Cingular had stolen two useful buttons from, hard-mapping them to useless carrier apps instead of the useful functions those buttons normally had.)

Then Apple came along and convinced Cingular to agree to have zero control over the handset software and apps. I cannot overstate enough how much of a game changer this was. And then all the other carriers had to agree to the same thing because they wanted to sell the iPhone, too. The entire smartphone industry benefited immensely from Apple dedtroying the carriers’ stronghold on handset software. Apple is the company that turned the carriers into the “dumb pipes” they should be.
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