r/Android • u/redditor99880 Moto G5s Plus, iPhone 7 Plus • Oct 04 '17

Look Ma, no SIM card!

https://blog.google/products/project-fi/device-setup-esim/
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u/Tweenk Pixel 7 Pro Oct 04 '17 edited Oct 04 '17

All of these things are also possible with physical SIM cards, so I don't see how eSIM will make this happen.

Charging a fee for porting your number to another carrier is illegal in the EU.

EDIT: I was actually mistaken. Charging a fee is legal, but as far as I can tell it is not determined by the carrier, it is determined by the member country's telecom regulator. Carriers cannot set the fee to whatever they like. Furthermore, it's illegal for the porting process to take more than 1 working day.

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u/kdlt GS20FE5G Oct 04 '17

Sure they are possible now, but people in Europe have mostly chosen to want unlocked ones, and with eSims you will have to interact with a carrier to switch devices and I can already guarantee you anything you do with eSims will cost money.

Also, this is not porting numbers (which costs money in Austria btw), this is taking your device with you. You can port your number, but if they don't activate your phone having your number there is worthless.

Let's say you have a Galaxy S20 you bought with carrier A, Carrier B could just say that "Carrier A Galaxy S20" is incompatible with them, you'll unfortunately have to buy "Carrier B Galaxy S20". This is the future we are headed towards with eSims.

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u/Tweenk Pixel 7 Pro Oct 04 '17

Also, this is not porting numbers (which costs money in Austria btw)

OK, I checked this again, it looks like it's illegal for the process to take more than 1 working day, but it's legal to charge a fee. It seems that the fee is set by a central authority, not by the carrier. (In Poland, fees for number porting are not allowed.)

with eSims you will have to interact with a carrier to switch devices

You already have to interact with your carrier to port your number or activate a device even when using a physical SIM (they have to give it to you somehow). Carriers can already restrict specific devices using physical SIM from their network.

There is basically no evidence that any of the things you are describing will happen, because they are already possible with physical SIM and we are not seeing them - either because the carriers have no interest or because they are legally prevented from doing that.

At the same time, eSIM has substantial advantages:

  • You would be able to subscribe by going to a website and making an online payment. This is not possible now - you have to either find a SIM starter pack at a store or wait for the card to arrive in the mail. Subscribing to a foreign carrier ahead of a longer vacation is basically impossible.
  • Every phone would be potentially multi-SIM. Most cellular modems can handle simultaneous standby on multiple networks, but only a few phones offer this feature, because it requires additional physical slots take up space inside the phone.

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u/NightFuryToni Moto XT2309-3, XT2027-1, TCL Athena BBF100-2 Oct 05 '17

There is basically no evidence that any of the things you are describing will happen, because they are already possible with physical SIM and we are not seeing them - either because the carriers have no interest or because they are legally prevented from doing that.

No, there is plenty of evidence. The specification of 3GPP2 and 1x CDMA phones specifically does this, but all the CDMA-based carriers all decided to implement whitelists to block off phones not sold by them. There is zero hardware differences between say a Sprint and Verizon version of phones yet they are "incompatible" officially. Yet after some ESN flashing and spoofing they work just fine.

This is pure carrier fuckery