E SIM the future?

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › E SIM the future?

Darwall

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#192357 8-Mar-2016 07:54

When the Samsung gear s2 came out I was really keen on it. How ever after researching a little I found it lacked a large number of features that my original gear already had. Enter the Gear S2 3G, now this model can do calling with it own cellular network like my original gear s can. So naturally I was keen. Cant buy it in NZ? Why? Because it has E SIM technology. The SIM card is inbuilt and doesn't get replaced depending on which carrier you have. The provider injects the details remotely into the device and you are go. Is this the future for all handsets? Apple might be working on this too apparently. When will our NZ carriers support this new tech?

iPhone 3gs ported to XT

sbiddle

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#1507852 8-Mar-2016 07:55

I think that yes, ultimately all devices will go down this path.

Linuxluver

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#1507875 8-Mar-2016 08:42

sbiddle:

I think that yes, ultimately all devices will go down this path.

It will be easier living without such locked devices. The unreliability of access as you travel, combined with the reduced flexibility will create a market for wifi connectivity supply that could see all SIMs go the way of the horse and buggy.

Unless we can load an E-SIM from an sd-card or similar. I'd be OK with that.

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old3eyes

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#1507914 8-Mar-2016 09:22

E-SIM will be like back in the AMPS and CDMA days where you just can't go and change carriers at will. You'll have to jump thru all sorts of hoops to do it..

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#1507916 8-Mar-2016 09:24

old3eyes:

E-SIM will be like back in the AMPS and CDMA days where you just can't go and change carriers at will. You'll have to jump thru all sorts of hoops to do it..

Certainly, if it was to be like that, it would be clear there wasn't really much competition in the telco market. This isn't something customers would demand. It would be the sort of thing an oligopoly imposed.

A law making it easy to unlock / re-SIM a device would be required to address this.

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Behodar

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#1507918 8-Mar-2016 09:28

There were rumours of Apple attempting this several years ago. At the time, Vodafone was the only official iPhone provider in NZ and I remember being concerned that it wouldn't be possible to use an iPhone on Telecom if this went ahead. Now it looks like the issue has become reality (although obviously Spark has iPhones now!)

Linuxluver

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#1507924 8-Mar-2016 09:36

Behodar:

There were rumours of Apple attempting this several years ago. At the time, Vodafone was the only official iPhone provider in NZ and I remember being concerned that it wouldn't be possible to use an iPhone on Telecom if this went ahead. Now it looks like the issue has become reality (although obviously Spark has iPhones now!)

Start writing to your (local / nearest / all) MP(s) on the issue now. Especially the Greens. They have been proven over and over to care about consumer rights more than any of the others. They would be most likely to promote it.

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roobarb

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#1507986 8-Mar-2016 11:10

I fully imagine that E-SIM will be used to enforce restrictions and lock in, and used to prevent parallel importing and grey markets. I would expect each country/region/carrier grouping to have their own keys and prevent phones that have not been approved for those networks from having those keys installed.

Rooting phones is not going to be any help by-passing keys on an E-SIM.

Darwall

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#1507992 8-Mar-2016 11:22

Imagine the 2nd hand market. Trading your phones will be a pain. Its Bad enough with current apple activation security! Of course for thieft it might be a deterrent .

iPhone 3gs ported to XT

richms

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#1508042 8-Mar-2016 12:04

I hope not. When I am out of data on my phone I will often swap it for the one in my tablet which I never get thru all the data on. Stays there till I run out again and I swap back. Also have a couple of numbers I keep alive because I have cards with them printed on them etc, so swap them over occasionally.

Will E-sim make multiple sim possible on any handset or still locked to one per handset despite no socket needed for a physical sim? That is the only use I can see for it, but unless I can easily swap the esim between devices, not be limited to one per device or have a way to carry them around on something else etc then I can only see it as a huge hassle for no gain.

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#1508123 8-Mar-2016 14:22

How will this allow things like Snapper and Semble integration into phones? Will the hardware be hard baked into esim hardware and just lie dormant unless pushed to the phone by the telco?

roobarb

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#1508155 8-Mar-2016 15:03

Disrespective:

How will this allow things like Snapper and Semble integration into phones? Will the hardware be hard baked into esim hardware and just lie dormant unless pushed to the phone by the telco?

If the E-SIM supports single-wire-protocol and wired up to the NFC antenna then it would work physically. If a local telco is allowed to put their complete profile in a security domain on the E-SIM then they should also be able to support Semble on the SIM.

SIMs can have multiple security domains so technically Semble does not have to be associated with a telco. Currently as telcos own the SIMs, Semble is a guest on those SIMs.

I expect a global territorial fight over the E-SIM real-estate between device makers, carriers, governments and standards authorities. I don't see the end user being the winner.

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BarTender

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#1511054 11-Mar-2016 08:47

I see eSim coming down to how the particular OEMs supply their provisioning stack will ultimately decide on who is the winner in that space.

So far it's pretty loose about how the SIMS are provisioned and the B2B required to get the STK with Ki and IMSI onto the eSim.

If I were a betting man I would expect Apple and Samsung to lead the way on end to end provisioning with the assistance of Gemalto and the other main Sim manufacturers. Then each carrier will need to have an Apple and Samsung and every other handset manufacturer OTA provisioning stack and then do some clever steering based on the IMEI of the device to point the user to a captive portal to let them sign up and then get the credentials securely installed on the eSim and the customer is away.

It's nothing like CDMA as the Device isn't provisioned on the providers network until the end-customer requests it.

I see a lot of win here for the customers and for the Handset OEMs. And a lot of pain for the carriers to support it in their backend.

sbiddle

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#1511117 11-Mar-2016 10:15

Disrespective:

How will this allow things like Snapper and Semble integration into phones? Will the hardware be hard baked into esim hardware and just lie dormant unless pushed to the phone by the telco?

UICC based SE is IMHO dead. Why should a device need to have a SIM slot to support payments?

Public transport poses issues with cloud based solutions such as HCE if all lookups have to be realtime as transaction times are not going to me sub 300ms, but we're in a world where tokenisation is moving forward and the whole requirement for a transport card to actually have to have funds preloaded is one that only exists because things have always worked that way. The move in London to TfL accepting Paywave/Paypass and Apple Pay and some exciting things planned for Sydney are showing the way forward.

Aredwood

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#1511708 12-Mar-2016 01:35

I struggle to see how an eSim could be as secure as a physical Sim card. As the sim contains keys that must remain secret for the sim to be reliably authenticated by the carrier. If not then phone cloning and toll fraud like back in the AMPS days can occur again.

Sure downloading the eSim updates can be encrypted. But will then need to be decrypted on the device. Even if the eSim is like a TPM module. It would still need some keys loaded from the factory, which would need to be known by every carrier. or a carrier would need an API to the phone company to provision a phone.

Im working from the point of view - imagine that the phone's OS is full of malware ect - anything the OS knows or does cannot be trusted. Can the process of provisioning new identities to the eSim still be secure?

roobarb

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#1511864 12-Mar-2016 11:20

Aredwood:

Im working from the point of view - imagine that the phone's OS is full of malware ect - anything the OS knows or does cannot be trusted. Can the process of provisioning new identities to the eSim still be secure?

Technically yes, consider an E-SIM is really a full SIM but does not have a socket, it is soldered in place. The SIM is a Secure Element and with mutual authentication is immune to man in the middle attacks.