I suppose you live in the US, with only a couple of huge carriers. I live in Germany, I am French, travelling a lot between France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland. I am so happy with the SIM card system. I can switch carrier if I want easily (swap the SIM card) but especially:
I do not care when I travel which carrier my phone will pick. It will work, nothing to do and I know what it will cost in advance.
I love SIM cards.
Update: Keep reading the thread with very good comments about identity. The added benefit of the SIM card is that it is protecting/managing your identity on the network without a hard link between your phone and you.
I travel enough to see the benefits as well. Phones that handle multiple sim cards are also nice.
I also view it as an added layer of security. My phone can't be connected to the network until the pin for my sim is entered. The ability to save data to the sim is also a nice feature. I don't really see any reason for them to go away.
Each phone could have a built in key for signing. You could tell operators to not allow any other phone except for yours (which has this key) to access your account. Not a problem.
Though, going to a store and proving who you are just to change a phone would be annoying. Maybe we could automate this. For extra security, we could use something besides a username and password. Maybe, the phone company could give us something, and we could use that to identify ourselves. Something we have. Maybe we could get the manufacturers allow us to store the identifier in the phone itself, and the phone could read the id card, and tell the phone company "Hey, this guy is good people!" that way, the entire process is all automated.
What happens here - is the phone itself becomes the sim card. That is troublesome on a number of levels. I'd rather push those functions to a little piece of plastic that is easy to move between handsets.
"You could tell operators"... How and where? When I'm in Thailand on vacation, I want data but I don't want to have to worry about registering my phone - I just go to kiosk and get a sim.
When I was in Ethiopia a few weeks ago getting a sim took a bit of work. I had to give them photos and some other documentation. A lot of governments are moving this way. Once it was done though, I had the sims I needed and the phone choices were wide open.
Maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle but in my experience the sim is what makes me free. The idea that the existence of a sim == being locked down comes from a broken telecom system not a technical limitation of the format.
There are some countries you do have to give extra documentation, and often providers will rip you off by giving you more airtime only if you register.
Funny you mention Ethiopia, the telecom there is completely state controlled, and it has been used to thwart opposition (listen in on calls, shut down complete SMS, etc). It's one of the many "remnants" of the communist regime. Supposedly Orange was coming in to manage and change that however...
SIM cards are exactly this, with the added benefit of (almost) two factor authentication. If I have my SIM card, I can be reasonably confident that you can't pretend to be me. If phones managed keys, I'd be more worried that you've managed to copy my key somehow.
Especially give the sheer number of apps out there and reports of apps doing more than they should, as well as users blindly installing apps with higher permissions than they actually require. This would get exploited very quickly no doubt.
Tell one major problem with SIM is the ancient outdated hard locked data model, and phone software developers refusing to implement a proper merge when exposing both SIM and phone data in UI.
I don't think you love simcards, I think you love the freedom to switch & a simcard is just the way you get that freedom right now. From a UX perspective the simcard is a pretty weak solution. For a starter, why do I have to reboot my phone to switch carriers?
You don't have to reboot your phone (e.g. the iPhone doesn't need a reboot when switching SIM cards). But a lot of phones hide the SIM under the battery, and your phone won't keep running with its battery off.
> From a UX perspective the simcard is a pretty weak solution.
Actually from a UX perspective sim cards are a pretty strong solution because there is a clear and simple 1:1 mapping between a physical object and a carrier. That's as simple an UX as can be: if I want to use carrier A I use SIM A, if I want to use carrier B I use SIM B.
> For a starter, why do I have to reboot my phone to switch carriers?
I don't know, do you? I don't. I just take out the iPhone's SIM tray, replace the SIM and put the tray back in.
> Actually from a UX perspective sim cards are a pretty strong solution because there is a clear and simple 1:1 mapping between a physical object and a carrier. That's as simple an UX as can be: if I want to use carrier A I use SIM A, if I want to use carrier B I use SIM B.
That must be why it's so common and popular to use physical tokens for the address list too. I really live to sift through the little plastic cards I keep in my pant pocket (careful not to lose one!) to find John Doe, insert it into the phone and reboot, just to make a phone call.
> Addresses don't significantly impact the phone's behavior (and its costs)
That would be a reason to keep the interface a physical token? Elaborate, please.
> phones don't need to reboot when changing SIM
The stupidly designed ones (with the sim behind the battery) does, but I see your point.
> people who criticize iPhones for not having a µSD slot
I was under the impression they miss the ease of data transfer and cheap storage space, not the act of changing the card to access other data. Please elaborate.
Actually the analogy is good. Having a physical token is very messy from a UX perspective. A menu is just as easy: If i want to use carrier A, i select carrier A in the menu, if i want to use carrier B, i select carrier B in the menu. This is what i do every day with my WiFi-network on my laptop....
Your µSD-comparison is what doesn't make sense. An SD-card can contain several gigabytes of data that would take hours to transfer to the phone. A SIM-card probably has a small key on maybe a few kilobytes that can be transfered and stored by any more or less modern communication-method, wired or not, within a few seconds.
But from a security perspective SIM is a much better solution because once you make the key transferable by software it will be much easier to steal an identity.
Business cards are hardly ideal. But, knowing that someone now has your correct contact information, because you just handed it to them is worth something. The problems only really show up when you want to keep several addresses at the same time and for most people that's rarely an issue with SIM cards.
The SIM card is so you CAN easily change your identity / phone. Without a SIM, how does the network verify your identity? A simple username and password are not as secure, and tying your identity to your phone is exactly what SIM cards were introduced to avoid.
And they count on being able to use your phone to confirm identity. Someone could hack your bank and phone at the same time so when you get a call about the suspicious transaction, it really goes to the hacker who says "yep, that was me".
I'm afraid if we kill SIM cards, the opposite will happen: your phone will be locked to one network, and switching networks means switching hardware (beyond just the sim).
I really like that while traveling I can just buy a local sim, put it in my own phone, and use it. That would only work in these wireframes if all operators would agree to support this. Which I think they won't.
That's been the case for ages because Verizon is a CDMA network, not GSM -- GSM takes SIM cards, while CDMA does not. Different tech.
This is likely to shift as V rolls out LTE, which DOES take SIM cards. So we're actually likely to see more intercompatibility as things progress. Except, of course, that everything's still likely to be carrier-locked.
Pardon my ignorance, but being in Europe means I've never used a 2G CDMA network - the iPhone4S supposedly works for both GSM and CDMA; if you don't get a SIM, does the CDMA module only work if you bought the phone from a CDMA network operator, and not if you bought it from Apple directly?
> does the CDMA module only work if you bought the phone from a CDMA network operator
Yes. They program it with your subscriber number at purchase. Technically they could reprogram phones not sold by them with your subscriber number, but they don't (to force you to give them more money).
There does exist a CDMA version of the SIM (RUIM? something like that). China Mobile uses it, and I think au/kddi do too. American carriers do not.
It gets worse in Canada. They carrier lock the phones to the brands. There's a big phone company called Telus that has a brand called Koodo and you can't swap phones between them even though it's actually the same network. All the joys of fake competition with none of the compatibility!
CDMA carriers can activate a phone not sold by them by ESN. However, some carriers have decided that they would prefer you to buy a handset from them and refuse to activate devices that weren't sold by them. Sprint has a policy of not activating any ESN that comes from a phone they didn't sell. I'm not sure if that applies to the iPhone since a non-Sprint iPhone would really be the same device. Anyway, unlike SIM cards, you're more at the mercy of whether a carrier will activate it or not.
ESN is equivalent to IMEI in GSM/UMTS networks. IMEI is tied to equipment, and never changes, just like ESN.
CDMA networks use IMSI to identify subscribers (as opposed to the equipment serial number) just like GSM/UMTS. IMSIs are provisioned on to the phone by the carrier with special software supplied by the phone manufacturer, instead of being supplied to the phone by the phone asking the SIM for it.
There's no technical reason why CDMA networks can't use a removable card to store subscriber data, and indeed there are a few standards for doing so (RUIM and CSIM) and a few carriers that use them.
It doesn't interfere with your speakers when transmitting? I'm not sure if this is still the case, but my old AT&T phone would cause my speakers to go haywire when I was about to receive a phone call. Never experienced that with Verizon or Sprint.
What are you talking about? GSM dates back to the mid 1980s and the first spec was published in 1991. The first mobile phone CDMA standard didn't come into play until 1995.
Depending on how you look at it, there can be many benefits, but as with most technologies, they're contextual.
CDMA uses 1.25MHz channels. That can be limiting in some ways, but advantageous in others. When deploying UMTS channels, AT&T or T-Mobile would need to clear out 10MHz of spectrum. Back when 3G wireless was first getting off the ground, it was decently common for a carrier to have below 30MHz in a market. To give two examples, Sprint and T-Mobile both had an average spectrum depth of around 25MHz. Sprint was able to get out of the gate fast on 3G requiring only 2.5MHz (around 10% of their spectrum) to deploy. T-Mobile had to wait until it purchased new AWS spectrum years later. The UMTS channels would have taken up 40% of their spectrum. So, it was difficult to clear out enough space to deploy UMTS. You were basically taking a third to half of your spectrum and making it unavailable for current customers. Then, as you launched the network and started selling 3G devices, customers would start moving their usage to the new technology. EV-DO (the CDMA data standard), on the other hand, only required a carrier to free up 2.5MHz of spectrum to deploy 3G. Even today, it can be an issue. As the number of GSM customers dwindle, AT&T and T-Mobile want to allocate more spectrum to UMTS. However, they can only do that in 10MHz chunks. They don't get to say, "ah, there's 3MHz that we should move to UMTS".
Likewise, because UMTS does voice and data, it meant that carriers had to install SS7 and mobile switching gear to handle the voice. EV-DO was an all-IP network that wasn't going to handle voice. While that could be a disadvantage in some ways, it provided the benefit of being easier to deploy in terms of equipment.
Taking that a step further, the lack of a voice requirement for EV-DO meant that they could launch a network in a much more piecemeal fashion. If one launched a UMTS network with lots of holes, call quality would be poor. Sure, calls could hand-off to GSM, but they might have a "1-bar" UMTS signal with crummy call quality while GSM users got excellent quality. Back then, if data didn't work or was delayed a bit, it didn't matter that much. People used data infrequently compared to calling and call reliability is what people paid for.
It should also be noted that when EV-DO was first deployed, it was faster than UMTS. UMTS R99 had a peak data rate of 384kbps, well below the 2.4Mbps of EV-DO Rel 0. Now, the wider band of UMTS made it more future-proof, but initially EV-DO looked very good.
To be fair to UMTS, I could talk about problems with CDMA as well. CDMA offered a bit more of a practical, easier transition to 3G for carriers. It's narrower channels made it easy to carve out spectrum, the fact that there wasn't a voice component meant that less equipment was needed and it didn't require the same initial reliability, etc.
CDMA also has better voice quality, although I'm not sure if this is a bandwidth thing or a codec thing, and not sure how universal it is on deployed networks.
My understanding from a friend in the telecom business is that, because the network operates at higher power, you need fewer towers for the same coverage area as GSM (GSM has a limit of something like 30km from a tower). And it tolerates multiple users in the same frequency space better than GSM and is less prone to interference from terrestrial radio signals.
A heck of a lot, and all current phone standards are based on it including current GSM.
GSM used TDMA which sliced a frequency into time slots. The time slots are allocated to the phones whether there is talking or not. This also leads to a fixed number of connections per frequency, and adjacent towers can't use the same frequency. It is also not forwards compatible since the phones expect certain behaviour from other phones in terms of using the time slots. That is why GSM carriers had to go out and get new frequencies when they added 2G data.
CDMA just has all phones broadcast at once. The phones merely see others as noise. When there isn't anything to transmit (voice calls have a lot of silence) then not much is transmitted. The tower will direct power levels to phones to keep the noise as low as possible. The net effect is that there isn't a fixed number of connections per tower/frequency, adjacent towers can use the same frequencies and it is forwards compatible - other phones can use newer versions and it won't affect current phones. CDMA is a lot harder engineering.
Here are a bunch of articles describing it in more detail from someone who worked on it.
This and Panmans comments were my first thought when I read that piece. I like the SIM card. When I went backpacking round the world I was able to pick up a pay as you go SIM card from a local store in any country, load it with credit and pop it in my phone and I'm all good to go. None of this sharing information from my phone business. You don't need to know my identity or payment information. I don't want the hassle of calling customer services in a country where they speak very little english because all of a sudden I have had £50 taken from my account due to some set up issue or whatever.
Anyway, as panman says, i think it will cause the opposite effect. Didn't the original GSM phones work in a similar way, with no SIM and some sort of mapping to a phone number at the carrier end? What is the likelihood that the carriers would remove the ability to change carriers, pretty high i'd say.
Didn't the original GSM phones work in a similar way, with no SIM and some sort of mapping to a phone number at the carrier end?
As far as I know (and recall), SIM was always part of the GSM specifications.
The first SIMs where credit card sized. Later generations where still credit card sized, but with a perforated breakout for the SIM as we know it (mostly).
The predecessor system (analogue mobile) didn't use SIM.
Ahhh, it was the old analogue phones I was thinking of. I never had one, my brother did though. I remember the big sim card and the perforated ones too :)
And while NMT phones didn't use easily (and user) replaceable SIM, they were paired to operator/number not by some database but by contents of replaceable EPROM chip in them. SIM cards were introduced not to make changing carriers possible, but easier and also more secure (NMT phones could be cloned without direct access to phone, only by eavesdropping on signaling channel).
I find the opposite version of that quite useful too - swapping SIMs lets me change my phone hardware out independently of my carrier/phonenumber. I can (with a $2 microsim adaptor) switch between an iPhone, a Galaxy SII, and occasionally a tiny not-very-"smart"phone-but-perfectly-adequate-for-voice-and-text Huewei device. Phone calls and text messages just arrive at whatever device I've got my SIM in.
Yes, totally agree with this. There is a comment further down here that someone says they swap out their SIM into an old dumB phone when out biking since if they fall the phone is less likely break. I've had the screen crack on a phone when it was in my back pocket and I sat on something. It's also handy swapping out to those basic dumb phones when you have no recharge facilities available, like when you are at a music festival, or out camping for the weekend.
Agree with the general sentiment. The down side is something I'm waiting (hoping) for someone to fix. If I get a text message on one phone I can't get to it when I put the SIM into my other phone.
It'd be awesome if there was an operator-netural, handset-neutral, multi-platform and secure cloud-based SMS sync service.
Yeah, if it worked outside the US I'd be on it in a flash. I suspect Twilio will have local-to-me-in-Australia endpoints before Google Voice does, so a hand-rolled Twilio solution is probably in my future.
Actually most older phones (first generation gsm-phones) stored sms (and contact-list) directly on the sim-card.
Swapping the sim into another phone and you would have everything accessible. Some phones had their own memory also so you could choose where to store it or it would revert to SIM when phone memory was out.
Problem was that the memory on the SIM was incredibly slow and small and had no support for advanced contact list management(like multiple numbers per name), so now every phone has its own storage.
Yes, my Nokia 8850 had no internal storage and therefore i could only hold 10 messages on the SIM. The later SIM's had more memory and could store 20 messages!
Seems strange having a phone that even stores them individually and doesn't group my contact these days!
Americans don't know that because their phone companies forbid that practice. AT&T doesn't even bother to move your SIM card from your old iPhone to your new iPhone when you upgrade, they just give you a new card.
That's not correct. I've used my phone on multiple carriers just by swapping the SIM card - and when I upgraded my phone, they used my existing SIM card.
Really, they give you a new sim on upgrade? I can understand this if you are upgrading TO an iPhone since you need a micro SIM, but rather pointless otherwise.
I think I've had the same SIM card for about 6-7 years now!
My experience with AT&T is they've always given me a new SIM, when buying a new phone from them, but I've also bought raw sim's from them with no problem.
I think they just write the "New Phone" script for their employees, with a new sim, so the steps,are always the same. Less chances to mess things up when there are less choices.
I am now on T-Mobile (from AT&T) and there are all sorts of T-Mobile features that may or may not work depending on what SIM card you have in your phone. And if they don't work you have to get a new SIM card (that is not guaranteed not to disable other features.)
What!? That seems to be the weirdest thing ever. What is going on?
When I switched from my old MotoRAZR to the iPhone, I used the same SIM. Just popped it in and I was good to go. My SIM still has the Cingular logo on it!
And complete anonymity. Most people don't care about this, but some of us do, sometimes. You buy a pay as you go sim card for £10, pay with cash, and toss it a week or month later.
You have to replace the handset too; calls are likable both to sim and equipment. Buying a prepaid handset with CDMA account esn built in is just as anonymous.
Retailers are supposed to take your name and address when buying a PAYG phone/SIM with cash. I've seen a Carphone Warehouse refuse a sale because of it - although they also don't verify the information you give them, so you could just lie.
This is currently hung on the SIM. Couldn't it just as well be hung on a web service, or paypal account? Why make it physical? This screams for virtualization.
The nice thing about having a physical object is that I can hand it easily to someone else, I can destroy it, I can save it, and I can do all these things when my service provider has disconnected me.
This is exactly what happened with the original analog and CDMA networks. Most carriers these days have converged on the HSPA and LTE standards which thankfully support SIM cards.
There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done. As evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of SIM cards, this particular battle has been won by almost unanimous decision in favour of the cards.
Only a few bastions of the original CDMA networks still don't natively support SIM cards (e.g. South Korea). But on the whole, it was already decided that SIM cards are here to stay since carriers demonstrated that without them, they are more prone to higher switching costs.
> There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done.
Indeed. RUIMs (and CSIMs) were standardized for CDMA, but carriers in the americas never bothered with them. A fair number of asian countries have CDMA carriers that use the, though.
I will definitely be shopping more carefully the next time I purchase a phone. I have an AT&T iphone 4. It works well, I have good coverage, and it can be used internationally, but AT&T will never unlock a phone, even after your contract is up, or if you are traveling overseas. I was in Europe for a week, and as soon as the phone connects, I get a text from AT&T saying that the data rate is $19.97/MB! Data was off, because I knew it would be a rip-off, but I had not guessed to what extent.
I don't see what sim cards have to do with locking in customers. Even in his hypothetical sim-free future there is nothing preventing the carrier from saying "if you select this plan you must pay us $59/month for the next 2 years before we let you cancel".
Indeed, as can be seen with Verizon (which does not use SIM cards on account of being a CDMA network)
And the other way around, nothing in SIM cards mandate lock-ins, I bought my phone unlocked (the previous one was bought simlocked and I'd made use of my legal rights to get it unlocked 6 months into my contract) and my current ISP is pre-paid, no-contract on SIMs. I ordered a SIM from them, popped it into my phone and I fill the account when I need to.
And when I travel across europe, I can trivially get cheapo pre-paid SIMs and put them in if I need to. There is no lock anywhere.
In fact, I'd expect far more lock-in with TFA's solution: my current indie ISP never managed to get a reply from Apple when they tried to get their IPCC into iTunes (so user would not have to enter e.g. data network info by hand), Apple only deals with big ISPs, not with virtual operators for a few tens of thousand clients in minor euro countries.
In principle, I love this idea. In practice, without a great deal of work, this will make it much more difficult to switch between phones, which typically occurs more often than switching carriers. Right now, you can pull out a SIM and put it in a new phone, and you can immediately use the phone number with that new phone, without any interaction with the carrier.
> In practice, without a great deal of work, this will make it much more difficult to switch between phones, which typically occurs more often than switching carriers.
In practice it also makes it much more difficult to switch between carriers (which is in fact much more common than switching between phones when you travel across Europe or south-east asia): to switch carriers right now, I just need to replace my current SIM with a new one (assuming the phone is not SIM-locked, which it is not).
Not if you use the same ssl certification authority mechanism that browsers use (obviously with some improvements to avoid common pitfalls). In fact, I would argue that it would be more secure (with revocation lists etc etc). Gone are the days that your phone can't do rapid handshaking / crypto etc etc.
I have an old Moto Razr that I put my SIM card in when I go on long bike rides in the boonies. The battery lasts longer and if I fall I don't have to worry about crushing my smartphone.
If your sim is implemented in software, how do you take it out of your smartphone when it breaks or runs out of battery and put it in a different phone?
While the concept is solid, getting carriers to go along with this is going to be impossible I would imagine. The other issue at hand is hardware pricing, especially for US consumers.
In the US, carriers love to lock their customers in by SIM locking their subsidized hardware and customers have come to expect this low cost subsidized hardware.
If you suddenly switched to a system where hardware was sold at retail cost, there would be a lot of confusion. I am guessing that if you ask the typical US consumer if they would like to buy their iPhone at $199 and commit to a contract or pay $649 for the ability to switch to another carrier at will, they will choose the contract option. It's what they have come to expect.
This type of system seems more suited to work in countries where subscribers already purchase unlocked hardware at full retail prices.
Sure US consumers are generally ignorant about the ins and outs of subsidized hardware, and they take 2-year contracts as a matter of course. But there's no reason a lot of people wouldn't pay full price if the economics were laid bare.
For instance, when I tell my US friends that I pay £15 / month for unlimited data, 300 mins, and 3000 texts on my iPhone with tethering in the UK, it blows their minds. The fact that I can hop over to another country, buy a sim card for 10 bucks and instantly have data without having to sit on hold and beg a customer service rep to unlock my phone and then wait weeks is another huge bonus that any internationally traveling American can appreciate.
The only problem right now is that major carriers have a good thing going with overpriced contract plans and see little reason to offer reasonably priced pay as you go, thus giving Americans the impression that mobile service is inherently more expensive than it is and believing that they are getting a great deal with subsidized phones. But with globalization this illusion is bound to come crumbling down sooner or later, and customers will demand more.
Personally I'm a big supporter of SIM cards. While competing network systems (CDMA, iDEN) were designed to lock in networks and users to a single vendor, GSM was designed by a consortium of european national telecoms at every single layer to ensure that all the stakeholders (users, telecoms, regulators) had as much interoperability and freedom as possible, and SIM cards are the user's end of that plan.
If Apple implemented his proposal, you can bet iPhone users would only be able to pick special overpriced iPhone plans, instead of just using whatever prepaid plan they want.
On a batch of 17 new phones rolled out about 30 days ago, we have had 3 iPhone users report problems that were tracked down to faulty/failed SIMs and one 'regular' SIM has failed in another phone - so I'm rather wishing SIM cards wouldn't keep dying!
When you go to select the list of carriers on your phone as you propose, your phone will only be able to show carriers for which it can tranceive. It's not like they all share the same spectrum.
Furthermore, switching numbers and accounts, and transferring them to other phones could be made more complex.
There's actually a really good reason why this isn't coming anytime soon to the US: number portability is not entirely centralized, and the porting system is built to run in batch, not in realtime.
So if, say, Sprint issues a portability request to Syniverse (the mapping platform provider) so that they can have your number from Verizon, Syniverse puts that request in the next batch. Then the batch gets passed to VZ for evaluation for things like whether you still owe them money. If you're good to go, VZ kills your DN (that's your number and the associated SVC mapping), and your VZ service goes dead. Then they pass your record back to Syniverse who then passes the thumbs-up and the number to Sprint who sets up a new DN to your new service (and presumably your new handset if you're going from one locked-in CDMA net to another).
That's a really watered down, 4am version of what happens. But the upshot of all of it is that if it worked like WiFi SSID switching, every time you switched, you'd probably lose service for awhile. If all things work for the good, the switch can take like 10 minutes. I'm sure they could get it down to 1 or 2. But probably not 0.
Here's the punchline... the SIM card in GSM was specifically designed to OBVIATE the need for all that (also to act as an encryption key, but that got hacked years ago). The SIM is supposed to authenticate you to a particular DN and link you back to a billing record at your primary carrier. The theory was that every carrier would create roaming treaties, and you'd just wander from network to network, oblivious to whose actual network you were on. And your primary carrier would sort it out on the backend. And in many places, it actually pretty much works that way. You can carry 3 or 4 cards and swap carriers and numbers based on the plan you want to use. Because the phones aren't locked to a single carrier's cards.
A good example of this is that in the T-Mobile / AT&T breakup, they came to an agreement to allow cross-network roaming sometime late this year. So if you're a TMo subscriber, but you've got an AT&T signal, even in a TMo service area, you'll just ride AT&T instead.
So essentially the reason it doesn't already work this way is because A) CDMA is so popular in the US, and CDMA really requires the rigorous porting process, and B) the carriers who do support it (AT&T, TMo and Sprint on their now-dwindling GSM net) have been jerks about it for years. It's a business decision, not a technical one.
The industry has been working on software SIMs for some time. I had a telco talking to me about the initiative years ago.
The problem is that the soft SIM provisioning process will become like DRM for phones. The users desires and the service providers desires are fundamentally misaligned here. Users want to be able to choose freely from the best tariffs available to them in a given location. Service providers want to lock people in and keep roaming expensive.
But surely this until the first carrier breaks the deadlock and then decides to offer soft SIMS to tourists ? Then the rest of then will be forced to follow on or else be squeezed out of the market. In fact, if you were a small-ish based carrier, then you could benefit from first-to-market as well as not being eaten by your customers going abroad (as you were first!).
I think the author is conflating SIM cards with vendor lock-in. Phones locked to SIM cards from a particular carrier are not good. If you want them to die, then fine - but that's got nothing to do with SIM cards.
SIM cards as authentication tokens work just fine. My phone takes SIM cards from any carrier. If I want to switch carriers, the new carrier just sends me a new SIM card.
Get rid of SIM cards, and you're going to end up with a security problem with keys being copied/cloned from phones. You're going to find that you need some kind of authentication based on a hardware crypto token, and will end up inventing...the SIM card.
In the UK now (possibly the EU) at the end of your contract (normally 18-24 months) the carrier has to unlock your phone now, my brother just came to the end of his contract and had his iPhone unlocked for free.
In the EU in general you can unlock your phone for a price, even if you're under contract.
The last time I checked Orange was charging something like 70 EUR for unlocking iPhones under contract, which is really not bad, considering you get the freedom to put any SIM in it after that.
Also, my own mobile carrier (Cosmote) sells subsidized unlocked iPhones. Basically for them the contract is enough to keep you "locked" as if you terminate early, you have to give back the subsidy you received for the remaining time, which is fair to both consumers and the mobile carrier.
It's crazy how better the mobile carriers are in Europe, versus the US.
As an engineer working in the SIM card industry, as long as they add some other form of secure element for placing highly sensitive data like bank/id applets it would still be reasonable.
As others have commented though, I'm afraid that they would use it to lock the consumer to phone specific plans.
I like a lot the ability to take my SIM card to other phones, as it allows to carry some kind of ID with me, there are better and seamless ways of doing that that I can't wait to be implemented and deployed (a user and password to put when booting the phone is not a solution).
One additional issue is certain countries (eg: India) require a photographic ID, etc before they issue a SIM. This is becoming a larger issue in Europe and elsewhere.
This guy so doesn't get it. It's almost as if he is trolling.
SIM cards (as implemented everywhere in the world except the US) is made to allow exactly the portability which he seeks.
I fail to see why it is even linked here.
Edit: Also why is he illustrating this with an iPhone? Is it for lulz that he in the name of advocating openness links to the closest closed phone of all out there?
In Australia, you must provide ID to purchase a SIM card. Whether it is pre-paid or post-paid. It is illegal to sell a SIM anonymously. I guess this is for law enforcement reasons, and that they wouldn't like to lose the ability to match a SIM with a citizen quickly and easily.
While an interesting read, its pure idealism on the part of the author.
For SIM cards to die as the author imagines the carriers would have to accept that in the future they nothing more than dumb data pipes. This would be excellent news for all consumers.
The US carriers have spent billions in marketing and lobbying to avoid becoming dumb data pipes so they will not accept this future.
And until the US regulator wakes up and starts regulating the carriers, then the status quo will prevail.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadI do not care when I travel which carrier my phone will pick. It will work, nothing to do and I know what it will cost in advance.
I love SIM cards.
Update: Keep reading the thread with very good comments about identity. The added benefit of the SIM card is that it is protecting/managing your identity on the network without a hard link between your phone and you.
I travel enough to see the benefits as well. Phones that handle multiple sim cards are also nice.
I also view it as an added layer of security. My phone can't be connected to the network until the pin for my sim is entered. The ability to save data to the sim is also a nice feature. I don't really see any reason for them to go away.
Good idea!
"You could tell operators"... How and where? When I'm in Thailand on vacation, I want data but I don't want to have to worry about registering my phone - I just go to kiosk and get a sim.
When I was in Ethiopia a few weeks ago getting a sim took a bit of work. I had to give them photos and some other documentation. A lot of governments are moving this way. Once it was done though, I had the sims I needed and the phone choices were wide open.
Maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle but in my experience the sim is what makes me free. The idea that the existence of a sim == being locked down comes from a broken telecom system not a technical limitation of the format.
Funny you mention Ethiopia, the telecom there is completely state controlled, and it has been used to thwart opposition (listen in on calls, shut down complete SMS, etc). It's one of the many "remnants" of the communist regime. Supposedly Orange was coming in to manage and change that however...
Besides it's not that bad in EU with roaming anymore http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/t...
Also, some operators allow to purchase "european data" - ie. unlimited european data roaming for cheap.
Actually from a UX perspective sim cards are a pretty strong solution because there is a clear and simple 1:1 mapping between a physical object and a carrier. That's as simple an UX as can be: if I want to use carrier A I use SIM A, if I want to use carrier B I use SIM B.
> For a starter, why do I have to reboot my phone to switch carriers?
I don't know, do you? I don't. I just take out the iPhone's SIM tray, replace the SIM and put the tray back in.
That must be why it's so common and popular to use physical tokens for the address list too. I really live to sift through the little plastic cards I keep in my pant pocket (careful not to lose one!) to find John Doe, insert it into the phone and reboot, just to make a phone call.
Or not.
* Addresses don't significantly impact the phone's behavior (and its costs), current ISP does
* As I noted, you might want to get out more, phones don't need to reboot when changing SIM
* Considering the number of people who criticize iPhones for not having a µSD slot, physical tokens do indeed seem trendy in crowds which need them
I'll agree it has several flaws. Still.
> Addresses don't significantly impact the phone's behavior (and its costs)
That would be a reason to keep the interface a physical token? Elaborate, please.
> phones don't need to reboot when changing SIM
The stupidly designed ones (with the sim behind the battery) does, but I see your point.
> people who criticize iPhones for not having a µSD slot
I was under the impression they miss the ease of data transfer and cheap storage space, not the act of changing the card to access other data. Please elaborate.
Your µSD-comparison is what doesn't make sense. An SD-card can contain several gigabytes of data that would take hours to transfer to the phone. A SIM-card probably has a small key on maybe a few kilobytes that can be transfered and stored by any more or less modern communication-method, wired or not, within a few seconds.
But from a security perspective SIM is a much better solution because once you make the key transferable by software it will be much easier to steal an identity.
They aren't. That they can be used as such does not make what you said true.
This is likely to shift as V rolls out LTE, which DOES take SIM cards. So we're actually likely to see more intercompatibility as things progress. Except, of course, that everything's still likely to be carrier-locked.
Yes. They program it with your subscriber number at purchase. Technically they could reprogram phones not sold by them with your subscriber number, but they don't (to force you to give them more money).
There does exist a CDMA version of the SIM (RUIM? something like that). China Mobile uses it, and I think au/kddi do too. American carriers do not.
CDMA carriers can activate a phone not sold by them by ESN. However, some carriers have decided that they would prefer you to buy a handset from them and refuse to activate devices that weren't sold by them. Sprint has a policy of not activating any ESN that comes from a phone they didn't sell. I'm not sure if that applies to the iPhone since a non-Sprint iPhone would really be the same device. Anyway, unlike SIM cards, you're more at the mercy of whether a carrier will activate it or not.
CDMA networks use IMSI to identify subscribers (as opposed to the equipment serial number) just like GSM/UMTS. IMSIs are provisioned on to the phone by the carrier with special software supplied by the phone manufacturer, instead of being supplied to the phone by the phone asking the SIM for it.
There's no technical reason why CDMA networks can't use a removable card to store subscriber data, and indeed there are a few standards for doing so (RUIM and CSIM) and a few carriers that use them.
However, you still can't do data and voice at the same time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-95
CDMA uses 1.25MHz channels. That can be limiting in some ways, but advantageous in others. When deploying UMTS channels, AT&T or T-Mobile would need to clear out 10MHz of spectrum. Back when 3G wireless was first getting off the ground, it was decently common for a carrier to have below 30MHz in a market. To give two examples, Sprint and T-Mobile both had an average spectrum depth of around 25MHz. Sprint was able to get out of the gate fast on 3G requiring only 2.5MHz (around 10% of their spectrum) to deploy. T-Mobile had to wait until it purchased new AWS spectrum years later. The UMTS channels would have taken up 40% of their spectrum. So, it was difficult to clear out enough space to deploy UMTS. You were basically taking a third to half of your spectrum and making it unavailable for current customers. Then, as you launched the network and started selling 3G devices, customers would start moving their usage to the new technology. EV-DO (the CDMA data standard), on the other hand, only required a carrier to free up 2.5MHz of spectrum to deploy 3G. Even today, it can be an issue. As the number of GSM customers dwindle, AT&T and T-Mobile want to allocate more spectrum to UMTS. However, they can only do that in 10MHz chunks. They don't get to say, "ah, there's 3MHz that we should move to UMTS".
Likewise, because UMTS does voice and data, it meant that carriers had to install SS7 and mobile switching gear to handle the voice. EV-DO was an all-IP network that wasn't going to handle voice. While that could be a disadvantage in some ways, it provided the benefit of being easier to deploy in terms of equipment.
Taking that a step further, the lack of a voice requirement for EV-DO meant that they could launch a network in a much more piecemeal fashion. If one launched a UMTS network with lots of holes, call quality would be poor. Sure, calls could hand-off to GSM, but they might have a "1-bar" UMTS signal with crummy call quality while GSM users got excellent quality. Back then, if data didn't work or was delayed a bit, it didn't matter that much. People used data infrequently compared to calling and call reliability is what people paid for.
It should also be noted that when EV-DO was first deployed, it was faster than UMTS. UMTS R99 had a peak data rate of 384kbps, well below the 2.4Mbps of EV-DO Rel 0. Now, the wider band of UMTS made it more future-proof, but initially EV-DO looked very good.
To be fair to UMTS, I could talk about problems with CDMA as well. CDMA offered a bit more of a practical, easier transition to 3G for carriers. It's narrower channels made it easy to carve out spectrum, the fact that there wasn't a voice component meant that less equipment was needed and it didn't require the same initial reliability, etc.
edit: here's a great comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_stan...
GSM used TDMA which sliced a frequency into time slots. The time slots are allocated to the phones whether there is talking or not. This also leads to a fixed number of connections per frequency, and adjacent towers can't use the same frequency. It is also not forwards compatible since the phones expect certain behaviour from other phones in terms of using the time slots. That is why GSM carriers had to go out and get new frequencies when they added 2G data.
CDMA just has all phones broadcast at once. The phones merely see others as noise. When there isn't anything to transmit (voice calls have a lot of silence) then not much is transmitted. The tower will direct power levels to phones to keep the noise as low as possible. The net effect is that there isn't a fixed number of connections per tower/frequency, adjacent towers can use the same frequencies and it is forwards compatible - other phones can use newer versions and it won't affect current phones. CDMA is a lot harder engineering.
Here are a bunch of articles describing it in more detail from someone who worked on it.
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml (politics, tech, how CDMA happened) http://denbeste.nu/cdmafaq/cdmatdma.shtml (tdma versus cdma) http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/04/Howspreadingactual... (what actually gets transmitted)
There's no way killing SIM cards would be a good thing.
Anyway, as panman says, i think it will cause the opposite effect. Didn't the original GSM phones work in a similar way, with no SIM and some sort of mapping to a phone number at the carrier end? What is the likelihood that the carriers would remove the ability to change carriers, pretty high i'd say.
The first SIMs where credit card sized. Later generations where still credit card sized, but with a perforated breakout for the SIM as we know it (mostly).
The predecessor system (analogue mobile) didn't use SIM.
It'd be awesome if there was an operator-netural, handset-neutral, multi-platform and secure cloud-based SMS sync service.
Swapping the sim into another phone and you would have everything accessible. Some phones had their own memory also so you could choose where to store it or it would revert to SIM when phone memory was out.
Problem was that the memory on the SIM was incredibly slow and small and had no support for advanced contact list management(like multiple numbers per name), so now every phone has its own storage.
Seems strange having a phone that even stores them individually and doesn't group my contact these days!
I think I've had the same SIM card for about 6-7 years now!
I think they just write the "New Phone" script for their employees, with a new sim, so the steps,are always the same. Less chances to mess things up when there are less choices.
I am now on T-Mobile (from AT&T) and there are all sorts of T-Mobile features that may or may not work depending on what SIM card you have in your phone. And if they don't work you have to get a new SIM card (that is not guaranteed not to disable other features.)
What!? That seems to be the weirdest thing ever. What is going on?
There HAS to be a better way than carrying around a legacy device.
This is exactly what happened with the original analog and CDMA networks. Most carriers these days have converged on the HSPA and LTE standards which thankfully support SIM cards.
There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done. As evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of SIM cards, this particular battle has been won by almost unanimous decision in favour of the cards.
Only a few bastions of the original CDMA networks still don't natively support SIM cards (e.g. South Korea). But on the whole, it was already decided that SIM cards are here to stay since carriers demonstrated that without them, they are more prone to higher switching costs.
Indeed. RUIMs (and CSIMs) were standardized for CDMA, but carriers in the americas never bothered with them. A fair number of asian countries have CDMA carriers that use the, though.
And the other way around, nothing in SIM cards mandate lock-ins, I bought my phone unlocked (the previous one was bought simlocked and I'd made use of my legal rights to get it unlocked 6 months into my contract) and my current ISP is pre-paid, no-contract on SIMs. I ordered a SIM from them, popped it into my phone and I fill the account when I need to.
And when I travel across europe, I can trivially get cheapo pre-paid SIMs and put them in if I need to. There is no lock anywhere.
In fact, I'd expect far more lock-in with TFA's solution: my current indie ISP never managed to get a reply from Apple when they tried to get their IPCC into iTunes (so user would not have to enter e.g. data network info by hand), Apple only deals with big ISPs, not with virtual operators for a few tens of thousand clients in minor euro countries.
In practice it also makes it much more difficult to switch between carriers (which is in fact much more common than switching between phones when you travel across Europe or south-east asia): to switch carriers right now, I just need to replace my current SIM with a new one (assuming the phone is not SIM-locked, which it is not).
In the US, carriers love to lock their customers in by SIM locking their subsidized hardware and customers have come to expect this low cost subsidized hardware.
If you suddenly switched to a system where hardware was sold at retail cost, there would be a lot of confusion. I am guessing that if you ask the typical US consumer if they would like to buy their iPhone at $199 and commit to a contract or pay $649 for the ability to switch to another carrier at will, they will choose the contract option. It's what they have come to expect.
This type of system seems more suited to work in countries where subscribers already purchase unlocked hardware at full retail prices.
For instance, when I tell my US friends that I pay £15 / month for unlimited data, 300 mins, and 3000 texts on my iPhone with tethering in the UK, it blows their minds. The fact that I can hop over to another country, buy a sim card for 10 bucks and instantly have data without having to sit on hold and beg a customer service rep to unlock my phone and then wait weeks is another huge bonus that any internationally traveling American can appreciate.
The only problem right now is that major carriers have a good thing going with overpriced contract plans and see little reason to offer reasonably priced pay as you go, thus giving Americans the impression that mobile service is inherently more expensive than it is and believing that they are getting a great deal with subsidized phones. But with globalization this illusion is bound to come crumbling down sooner or later, and customers will demand more.
They tried: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/05/24/apple-wanted-to-...
Personally I'm a big supporter of SIM cards. While competing network systems (CDMA, iDEN) were designed to lock in networks and users to a single vendor, GSM was designed by a consortium of european national telecoms at every single layer to ensure that all the stakeholders (users, telecoms, regulators) had as much interoperability and freedom as possible, and SIM cards are the user's end of that plan.
If Apple implemented his proposal, you can bet iPhone users would only be able to pick special overpriced iPhone plans, instead of just using whatever prepaid plan they want.
Furthermore, switching numbers and accounts, and transferring them to other phones could be made more complex.
So if, say, Sprint issues a portability request to Syniverse (the mapping platform provider) so that they can have your number from Verizon, Syniverse puts that request in the next batch. Then the batch gets passed to VZ for evaluation for things like whether you still owe them money. If you're good to go, VZ kills your DN (that's your number and the associated SVC mapping), and your VZ service goes dead. Then they pass your record back to Syniverse who then passes the thumbs-up and the number to Sprint who sets up a new DN to your new service (and presumably your new handset if you're going from one locked-in CDMA net to another).
That's a really watered down, 4am version of what happens. But the upshot of all of it is that if it worked like WiFi SSID switching, every time you switched, you'd probably lose service for awhile. If all things work for the good, the switch can take like 10 minutes. I'm sure they could get it down to 1 or 2. But probably not 0.
Here's the punchline... the SIM card in GSM was specifically designed to OBVIATE the need for all that (also to act as an encryption key, but that got hacked years ago). The SIM is supposed to authenticate you to a particular DN and link you back to a billing record at your primary carrier. The theory was that every carrier would create roaming treaties, and you'd just wander from network to network, oblivious to whose actual network you were on. And your primary carrier would sort it out on the backend. And in many places, it actually pretty much works that way. You can carry 3 or 4 cards and swap carriers and numbers based on the plan you want to use. Because the phones aren't locked to a single carrier's cards.
A good example of this is that in the T-Mobile / AT&T breakup, they came to an agreement to allow cross-network roaming sometime late this year. So if you're a TMo subscriber, but you've got an AT&T signal, even in a TMo service area, you'll just ride AT&T instead.
So essentially the reason it doesn't already work this way is because A) CDMA is so popular in the US, and CDMA really requires the rigorous porting process, and B) the carriers who do support it (AT&T, TMo and Sprint on their now-dwindling GSM net) have been jerks about it for years. It's a business decision, not a technical one.
The problem is that the soft SIM provisioning process will become like DRM for phones. The users desires and the service providers desires are fundamentally misaligned here. Users want to be able to choose freely from the best tariffs available to them in a given location. Service providers want to lock people in and keep roaming expensive.
SIM cards as authentication tokens work just fine. My phone takes SIM cards from any carrier. If I want to switch carriers, the new carrier just sends me a new SIM card.
Get rid of SIM cards, and you're going to end up with a security problem with keys being copied/cloned from phones. You're going to find that you need some kind of authentication based on a hardware crypto token, and will end up inventing...the SIM card.
The last time I checked Orange was charging something like 70 EUR for unlocking iPhones under contract, which is really not bad, considering you get the freedom to put any SIM in it after that.
Also, my own mobile carrier (Cosmote) sells subsidized unlocked iPhones. Basically for them the contract is enough to keep you "locked" as if you terminate early, you have to give back the subsidy you received for the remaining time, which is fair to both consumers and the mobile carrier.
It's crazy how better the mobile carriers are in Europe, versus the US.
As others have commented though, I'm afraid that they would use it to lock the consumer to phone specific plans.
I like a lot the ability to take my SIM card to other phones, as it allows to carry some kind of ID with me, there are better and seamless ways of doing that that I can't wait to be implemented and deployed (a user and password to put when booting the phone is not a solution).
If this has been already patented by the Cupertino-based patent-troll, it is by definition doomed as a standard.
SIM cards (as implemented everywhere in the world except the US) is made to allow exactly the portability which he seeks.
I fail to see why it is even linked here.
Edit: Also why is he illustrating this with an iPhone? Is it for lulz that he in the name of advocating openness links to the closest closed phone of all out there?
I'm voting troll here.
For SIM cards to die as the author imagines the carriers would have to accept that in the future they nothing more than dumb data pipes. This would be excellent news for all consumers.
The US carriers have spent billions in marketing and lobbying to avoid becoming dumb data pipes so they will not accept this future.
And until the US regulator wakes up and starts regulating the carriers, then the status quo will prevail.