Swapping Sim Cards Used to Be Easy, and Then Came Esim
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The shift to eSIM has sparked a heated debate, with many lamenting the loss of freedom to transfer SIM cards between devices at will. Some commenters argue that eSIM is "shitty" and designed to deny user freedom, while others point out that alternatives like esim.me and "sysmocom eUICC for eSIM" exist, albeit at a steep price. As one commenter noted, a software-only eSIM with full transfer support would be ideal, but it's not available due to GSMA restrictions. Meanwhile, others counter that eSIM has its advantages, such as freeing up space for batteries and making phones smaller.
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well yeah, of course esim is shitty, as is everything imposed by big tech monopolies to their users without consulting or caring about what they really want. Did you think they were here for your wellbeing and not the money ?
Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new phone, I needed the carrier to approve. But I was away from my home country and on roaming. So I tried to call them. They needed me to use a verification PIN they would send via SMS on the old phone, to verify the transfer to the new one. Impossible since the old phone is unusable.
Back in the day, I'd have just taken out the sim from the old phone and moved it to the new one. Easy peasy.
The only other option in this case now was to visit one of their stores thousands of miles away. Eventually just ended up doing that when I returned weeks later but during this time I could not access several services due to lack of access to my number plus 2 factor codes being sent there.
Moving a sim from phone to phone was seamless. Now the carrier needs to approve this swap. Even with two working phones sometimes it's a hassle and there will be delays while carriers decide to approve the move. There is a new feature that allows you to transfer eSIMs easily between phones but carriers seem to be holding onto their power in this regard and not every carrier will let their sims move so easily. This possibly requires regulators to step in and solve the issue - make it up to the user to move eSIMs. I would count on the EU to make this easier at some point.
On the plus side, eSIMs are nice to be able to signup and provision them through an app. Helps with travel and roaming. So there's that too.
Why? Decode the QR code and store the text however you prefer to store text.
You could self-host Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, or something like that.
> don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.
I think they send 2FA to all supported devices on one's Apple account?
and also another situation in which the 2fa code would flash on the remote device and disappear in a fraction of a second. i eventually captured it with screen recording but every time i did it the code was not accepted.
my conclusion: apple had silently ruled that i would not be allowed to activate using that particular icloud account. no idea why. i tried a different one and things went through ok.
arbitrary power in practice.
The best option would be a software-only eSIM with full transfer support, IMO. But we don't have that, because GSMA says we can't have nice things.
Yep, I remember a time where you could extract the Ki and IMSI from legit SIMs and write that to a bog standard Goldwafer card (which were also used for cable TV hacking) including some SIM emulation software and thereby clone the SIM. That was like 30 years ago and the only thing that changed in SIMs since then is better encryption.
The obvious issue being: it's pretty hard to acquire raw key material. Most vendors refuse to sell it, and the workarounds are messy.
It wasn't the only reason, but was at least one of the stated reasons for the jack removal.
It's nice to know that you're on a telco that supports "eSIM Quick Transfer", but that's still a feature that telcos need to explicitly support.
On the flip side, being able to have a primary I never change and a secondary that I swap out for international travel has proven to be extremely valuable to me. So you take the bad with the good.
This made me laugh.
I was even offered paperclips to keep at airport SIM counters before.
Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?
Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators
I remembered there was a South Park episode where Cartman was being a stereotypical self-absorbed person walking around with their phone on speaker. I looked it up, and that episode came out in 2013. At the time, most phones on the market had a 3.5mm jack. Yet people not using headphones/headsets was an experience common enough to be turned into a joke in the show.
I don't think there's much correlation between 3.5mm jack availability and using a phone's speaker output in public.
"Simple" as you've used it is open to interpretation. I personally held on to wired headsets longer than most of my friends and family. You know what I don't miss, now that I've preferred wireless for a few years? Untangling the cable. Accidentally catching the cable on something and having an earbud ripped out. Picking lint out of the jack. Staying conscious of the length and positioning of the cable in the context of my own movements.
Other than the BT connection process, which is only complicated if you're fortunate enough to own multiple devices and headphones/sets to connect to them, wireless can be a lot "simpler" in actual usage.
One point I'll make is simplicity comes in many forms. Wired headphones can be dirt-cheap, they don't run out of battery, and I don't think they're as prone to getting lost
The battery point is valid. Funnily enough, the last pair of earbuds I lost was a wired one. Myself, most of my headsets are over-ear, so they're a bit large to be easily lost. The form factor likely determines the loss potential more than the presence/lack of a wire.
And, unless you're using fancy headphones and get lucky, default "SBC" codec will be used. That abomination uses 3 times the bandwidth of MP3 (and 5 times the bandwidth of AAC) for comparable quality.
High bandwidth -> packet loss/retransmissions -> increased latency (and sometimes even dropouts/hiccups)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBC_(codec)
The risk of losing one (or both) earbud is a real one. My ears don't tend to keep snug grip on the earbuds so they tend to get loose after I walk a little. With earbuds, this might just be my own singular piece but, there is also the chance that only one of the two would connect to your phone.
On the other hand, the cables get tangled together. I can't walk around with them because the cable gets stuck in the swing of my arms. Connecting them to the phone after a call had already started was a piece of cake though. With bluetooth, I never have my earbuds on when I actually need them and it's too much of a pain to take them out of my bag and connect them.
Whenever it is time to replace my current earbuds, I am gonna go for a neckband instead. It has basically the best of both, imo (I am not that sensitive to audio quality mostly) and the downsides aren't large enough (I'll think of the weight as a neck workout).
I bought a pair of double flange doohickies to replace the standard ones.
The current problem is that LE Audio implementations are new with lots of headphones having them as beta.
That you need a cable for it?
Most people don't need latency, and I don't really have any latency issues. I watch videos with Bluetooth headphones and they're all synchronized perfectly.
With Bluetooth I can also "just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears."
Note: I have not tried this. It is simply offered as an example to show they are available.
https://www.amazon.com/Headphone-Charger-Charging-Earphones-...
USB-C extension cables aren't allowed, but pass-through charging is allowed. I suspect a $7 cable from a Chinese amazon seller is not spec-compliant, but e.g. Belkin sells a spec-compliant "3.5mm Audio + USB-C Charge Adapter".
Nice. They don't work on Pixels if they don't have a DAC, because Google in its infinite wisdom decided not to include one on the Pixel series.
And cables like these violate the USB spec.
Again: what was the harm in including a 3.5mm jack?
Recently had a phone go bad when the thunderbolt port stopped working due to the same port being used repeatedly for charging and for audio adapter.
So when I updated the phone I grudgingly decided to get a BT earbud.
I also am a hardcore 3.5mm headphone user. Wireless headphones are garbage.
I did get my mind changed on USB-C DACs by way of inductive charging. Using an USB-C DAC and still being able to inductively charge seems at least somewaht reasonable to me.
On the newest round of phones for my wife and me I've tried to make sure we're inductively charging >90% of the time.
Need to dig deeper into inductive charging as it seems to heat the battery more especially if the phone is in a case. So yet another tradeoff to consider.
Good thing is that if the port goes bad it can still be charged.
Easy. You can't charge and listen to your headphones at the same time.
Now you need a usb->usb + 3.5mm to keep it charged up or an add on battery.
In my experience the connection is much easier to accidentally break through movement (e.g., walking) with a USB-C adapter than straight-through 3.5mm.
I really miss having a 3.5mm output on my phone...
I think it just adds friction (for measure, I feel audio jacks are pretty good)
So the real response is, "what's wrong with most companies to not provide the 3.5mm itself?"
It's good that xperia's doing this though. I think I still have phones which have 3.5mm itself so there isn't much to worry about. I think there are a lot of new phones which do offer it, I think both of my parents phones have support for 3.5mm by itself.
Hidden inside of a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is an entire DAC with a power amplifier for driving headphones. They're complex little things.
And like any other bit of active, plug-in electronics: They're not all the same.
Some of them are wonderful (Apple's adapter sounds great and don't cost much), but and some of them are terrible.
And there's compatibility issues. The combination of an Apple headphone adapter on an Android produces a volume control bug that prevents a person from turning it up even to normal line level output voltages that normal audio equipment expects.
And there's functional issues: Want to play some lossless audio in the car or low-latency audio on headphones, and charge your phone at the same time? Good luck with that! (Yeah, there's adapters that have USB C inputs for power, too. They're a mess. And I once popped one as soon as my phone negotiated a 12VDC USB PD mode instead of the 5VDC that the adapter must have been made for. (And no, wireless charging isn't a solution. It's a bandaid for the deliberately-inflicted footgun incident that brought us here to begin with.))
And it's complicated: For a "simple" audio output, we've got USB 2 with a signalling rate of 480Mbps and a power supply, when all we really want is 20Hz-20KHz analog audio with left, right, ground, and (optionally) microphone.
And then: It often doesn't work. When I plug the USB C headphone adapter I have into my car and go for a drive, it disconnects sometimes: I observe no physical change, but the device resets, the music stops, and the phone rudely presents a prompt asking me which voice assistant I'd like to use. And then I get to figure out how to make it play music again, which presents either a safety issue or a time-suck issue while I stop somewhere to futz with it. (Oh, right. Did I mention that the electronics in these adapters also include support for control buttons? I guess I glossed over that.)
Forcing the use of USB C headphone adapters and their complexities represents a very Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the simple problem of audio interconnection that had already been completely solved for as long as any of us reading this here have been alive.
Except: While Rube Goldberg contraptions are usually at least entertaining, this is just inelegant and disdainful.
I've never understood spending more than that on a phone anyway, you can't exactly use all that processing power on a phone operating system. Unfortunately some of the bad features from expensive phones have been moving down to the cheaper ones, like the destroyed screen that's missing its corners and has a hole for the camera in it for some reason.
1. Buy a non-crappy, dedicated, phone. Many of these feature better reception, voice quality, and battery life than a smartphone, as well as being smaller and lighter. Heck, smartphones are going this direction with satellite devices (earbuds, smart watches) already. Your "phone" is in your ear, most of the smarts stay in your pocket or bag.
2. A camera.
3. A full-fledged mobile device which is actually usable. Small form-factor laptop / hybrid beats pretty much any smartphone or tablet.
If all you need is the phone, that's what you carry. Much of the time you can carry other device(s) as well. My list would probably extend to a voice recorder. As with the camera, that's relatively inexpensive and long-lived, so you end up with less long-term expense.
My largest concern is camera quality: obviously it is Sony, but if you wouldn't mind, could you elaborate on their camera 'stack' a bit (esp. in relation to pixel phones if you have first hand experience...).
By a _substantial_ margin, because the best bang-for-your-buck strategy with smartphones for a long time has been to buy used or refurbished popular flagships for the last one or two years. As much as I like what Xperias are doing with a headphone jack and an SD card slot, the used market for them is almost non-existent. I myself have settled on using dongles and an external hard drive.
It is some carrier configuration bullshit or something like that. There may be a way to make it work, but it did not look guaranteed after reading dozens of pages on forums on the topic. I ended up retuning the Sony I tried whilst I could still get a full refund.
Phones used to be exciting. Now it is just frustrating because all the good features are gone. Headphone jack, sd card, fingerprint sensor on back, unlockable bootloader.
I learned from this experience that maybe eSIM is a good idea and I switched immediately upon hearing this person's story. Did I miss something?
So changing phones can be done without any customer support or web forms or calls to service provider etc. You just buy a new phone and pop in the old sim.
Except many carriers have you jump through hoops to activate an eSIM on a new device. Here in the comments one person has to receive a new QR over snail mail.
For me it was 10 mins through my provider's app (and I was also doing it internationally)
What verification processes did you have to go through?
If it's simple username/password, that could mean that your number could be trivially hijacked by a determined enough attacker.
Neither SIM nor eSIM would have helped.
In that case, I waited to get home (I didn't live in Illinois) and got a new SIM by mail.
As another anecdotal data point, I was able to switch phones internationally using a physical SIM by just putting it in the new phone.
Are you sure that his carrier allows activating an eSIM while roaming? Mine definitely doesn't, which means that if I break my phone while abroad, I lose access to online banking.
SIM cards have always been secure elements that the provider trusts. With an eSIM, you can already own that secure element and the provider can provision it with their application. You can even have the applications from multiple providers on the same physical secure element.
The major advantage is now that the expensive and time-consuming part of provisioning a new mobile service (sending out a physical SIM card) can be replaced with a few standardized API calls. This is cheaper (which makes the extra cost some providers charge for an eSIM look quite silly) and a lot quicker, which enables new business models for short-lived cell connection services.
A world where all cell service providers offered eSIMs would be slightly nicer. But manufacturers removing the option of swapping the secure element is very annoying at the same time.
I’ve had a SIM card constantly fail and require me to put my pin to unlock it multiple times in the same day. If someone wanted to call me they would not be able to because I didn’t know it was off.
It might be nice if manufacturers implement a HUUGE LOUD warning when enabling an eSIM that requires carrier authorization to remove though. Someone should put that in the Android bug tracker.
Gosh, that sounds pretty nuts if some $5 throwaway travel eSIM refused to be removed after a few days of use.
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.)
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.
For the carriers I can see that. Especially the part where users can't move their esim without carrier cooperation. That grants telcos (and sometimes handset manufacturers) additional control over users - control that they don't get with physical sim.
As far as user's time and expense, physical sim aren't a burden. I get a new SIM each month. It's 1 min to install it and update my forwarding #. Service is $23/mo for 10GB, etc.
When I need my sim elsewhere (ex:5g router), I just move it. Having a physical sim saves me money + hours and hours a year.
...to the carrier/phone manufacturer/etc
I can even see it for the customers that fumble paperclips and don't mind living with uncertainty.
I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to be a hassle to switch to another phone if I couldn't get the old one powered on enough to run the esim transfer, much less the whole OS migration.
Definitely made me feel that at the very least I should be getting a yubikey so that I can have authenticator codes across multiple devices.
And the T-Mobile Germany portal to download a new eSIM required authentication via SMS to that now deactivated number. That was fun. (As they didn’t have an alternative procedures to provision eSIMs in place, we had to go visit a store to get a new physical SIM first and could then convert that to eSIM.)
This seems like a "draw the rest of the owl" situation. If I arrive in a new country with no phone data (which is why I need a sim in the first place) then how do I download an app? Being able to walk up to a guy at the airport and within seconds slide in a SIM solves that data problem.
I can download T-Mobile eSIM from Australia - Pay them $15, know what my +1 USA number will be, all before leaving the country. You just can't do this with classical sims.
That's exactly the use case for which the carriers offer roaming plans. The bonus is that you (as in your phone number) get to remain connected and accessible by your contacts, as no other phone number is involved at any point. One should not need to change the SIM unless is about one's phone change.
Ended up switching to AT&T.
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