iPhone 14 Thankfully Accelerates The Shift To eSIM
from the about-damn-time dept
One of the more notable announcements at Apple’s event this week was that the iPhone 14 lineup won’t have a physical SIM tray to swap out SIM cards. Instead, the devices will embrace eSIM, a technology that’s supposed to make it easier than ever to switch carriers without consumers needing to buy and install a new SIM card.
With eSIM, user identification technology embedded in a traditional SIM card is instead transferred to the device’s processor or modem itself. Ideally, that could let a consumer switch carriers within just a few seconds. iOS 16 also lets you transfer your eSIM between iPhones via Bluetooth.
As we’ve covered in the past, AT&T and Verizon didn’t much like technology that made switching carriers easier, since, for the last few years, they’d been losing subscribers hand over fist to T-Mobile, and (correctly) worried that eSIM would accelerate that trend (T-Mobile lets users use eSIM to test drive the T-Mobile network for a few months).
So AT&T and Verizon leveraged their influence over the GSM Association (GSMA) — a trade association for mobile network operators — to hamstring the technology’s rise. This was done by ensuring the inclusion of bizarre and arbitrary restrictions and bureaucracies a DOJ investigation found served no technical purpose outside of slowing the actual implementation of the tech and locking users to one carrier (as is often the case, AT&T and Verizon faced zero penalty for the behavior).
Which is a long way of saying that Apple fully embracing eSIM will be a good thing. With some growing pains and shorter term caveats. For example, there are some concerns among international carriers that a lack of eSIM options will lock them into paying obnoxiously expensive roaming costs through US carriers:
Still, that problem should be mitigated as eSIM becomes the global standard, which will happen a hell of a lot more quickly now that the most popular phone maker on the planet has fully embraced the tech.
Filed Under: 5g, competition, esim, iphone, mobile carriers, telecom
Companies: apple