Dealing with the carrier is usually the worst part of owning a phone. Asking for a new esim is likely to send you down a path of navigating a process where they try to sell you an upgrade, or they send you a QR code that doesn't work, or a million other possible problems.
> Dealing with the carrier is usually the worst part of owning a phone.
It's probably intentional. I was reading an article in the French press the other day [0] on the subject. Some head of something or other in the industry said they were weary of mostly Apple, Samsung, and Google starting to like playing the providers and removing the actual carriers from the users' psyche. "The SIM card is the last physical link between the carrier and the client".
I've also checked my carrier's site for getting an esim. Apparently I'd have to pay the same amount to get one as for a physical one (minus delivery costs). But at least, contrary to some other commenters' situation, they seem to allow you to move it from phone to phone as long as you hold on to your qr code. They, of course, don't offer the option of storing it in the "secure" client area.
When I bought my phone last year at a carrier store, they really, really pushed me to get a physical SIM card. I asked them why they wanted me to install a physical SIM they told me I’ll get higher data speeds.
In my case, it was two clicks in the carrier's web interface and I got the new QR code showed me and even sent by email. No upgrades, no dark patterns, just presented a QR code, I scanned it, worked. It took like 2 minutes
Yes, but what does that tell us? How is that useful? All you've done is point out a situation where the happy path works. If you have a great carrier whose systems are working correctly then it's going to be fine. That's what you'd expect. No one really cares about the cases where things go right. They're boring. They should be boring. The problem is never what happens when it works, but what happens when it doesn't work.
I've spent the past two and a half decades learning that the happy path is the least interesting part of any system. Building a working app is about 10% of the work of building anything. The other 90% is error handling, designing processes to get things back on track, and managing when things change. If you focus on the bit that works, and you assume that things will work, and that any human part of the system works (where code is written by humans) it is bound to break at some point.
The issue here is that taking a physical sim card works and dropping it in a different handset has far fewer moving parts and it's all stuff that's been proven over the past 30 years. There is less to go wrong. As soon as you start adding carriers and their shitty websites into the mix things will screw up for a non-trivial number of users.
How about we wait and see if this actually happens instead of prematurely complaining that the sky is falling?
All indications so far are that eSIMs work quite well. Plus it’s pretty awesome to be able to purchase prepaid service through a company like Airalo when traveling abroad and to be able to use it instantly. Same goes for switching carriers.
How about we wait and see if this actually happens instead of prematurely complaining that the sky is falling?
Generally speaking, leaving something to see if it'll work means it's too late to change things easily if doesn't work. Managing change is one of the hardest things to do in any company, let alone industry, so finding the problems during the testing phase is really important. If it gets to the consumer and things aren't working (which happens a lot) that means people screwed up.
Buying a local sim card and putting it in your phone when you're travelling works fine, and instantly, so eSIMs aren't offering any advantage there besides not needing to go to a local shop.
And that is a huge advantage both for consumers and providers. You’re grossly underrating the benefits to commerce and the reduction of purchase friction.
And then your carrier bills you 3€ for it, because they can. They can also just disable the iPhone-to-iPhone eSIM transfer functionality. Ask me how I know.
eSIMs are incredibly user-hostile because they switch the ownership of a SIM card from the customer to the provider, so you're completely at their mercy if you need to transfer over your SIM card from one device to another. And Apple facilitates this.
eSIM is a potentially smoother setup process if the alternative is getting a card through the mail, but physical SIM switching is better than having to contact your carrier.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is always true for physical SIMs.
I recently bought a temporary SIM in the US during my holidays (StraightTalk) and was surprised that you can only use the physical SIM after you register online with you IMEI.
I haven't checked, but I imagine that after that the card would only work with that IMEI.
Fortunately, I don't think this is a practice in Europe.
To be fair, though, Straight Talk is absolutely hot garbage. I had a fiasco trying to activate two physical SIMs and port numbers to them back in January. Their provisioning system chokes and dies on phones with both eSIM and physical SIM capability (like the factory-unlocked iPhone SE 3rd gen models I was trying to activate). I spent hours on the phone holding and talking to reps, getting disconnected and calling back to start all over again. It was a nightmare.
I'm quite happy to read this, because my experience was also awful - they didn't accept the IMEI of 3 phones I tried and their app is full of ads (not to mention that I kept receiving scam calls).
I really hope that it's because they are awful and this is not the typical American mobile phone experience.
eSIMs also have the advantage of an activation card can be sent instantly from almost anywhere (it’s a QR code) which is great if your phone (and physical sim) are lost or damaged.
> Some carriers support SIM transfers from your previous iPhone to your new iPhone without needing to contact them
“Some” is true afaik. It’s at the providers discretion.
AFAIK it’s also only possible if you’re moving from iPhone to iPhone, not if you’re moving to an Android. I’m not certain moving back and forth between multiple phones is easily supported.
I like e-sims in general, but this is a downside for some use cases.
In theory eSIM allows for self service without going to a store or waiting for shipping. In practice you might be on hold with your phone company for an hour. Some USA MVNOs don’t support eSIM.
As the person managing phone contracts in our company, I really like that part of eSIMs. I can mail a phone or have the employee purchase one and then mail my providers support and I‘m all set. About one hour later, the phone will have connectivity. If you‘re using an MDM solution that supports it, you can even manage the assigned eSIMs there.
Now, we‘re on a business contract and we have a responsive team on the other side, so the comfort of this hinges on the provider obviously.
Not everywhere in Europe..., In Slovakia 3/4 operators have single-use QR codes (and for the 4th you have to first remove your eSIM from your old phone before transferring to new, which wouldn't help in case of broken/stolen phone) and none of them have an easy to use web interface to generate a new one, you have to contact support somehow for them to generate it for you.
One operator even charges 10€ for a new QR code for your eSIM (same price as getting a new physical SIM card).
Reading this comment and others, it sounds to me like legislating the carriers and phone manufacturers to force them to make eSIM more user friendly would work just as well (or better?) as legislation to mandate physical SIM slots.
Yes, definitely. And while we're at it also force them to support eSIM smartwatch profiles. In Slovakia 0 carriers support them, not even Telekom, which supports them in 4/5 neighboring countries..
If the phone breaks it’s much easier to just transfer the card to a different phone though, if a code needs to be sent there’s the identification problems.
You need the carrier to offer eSIM, of course, but then you can just store a bunch of eSIMs on your iPhone and switch which one is active in the Settings app.
I think you’re unnecessarily worried about this. If you don’t trust your carrier to get this process right, perhaps it’s worth choosing a different carrier.
Do you know a carrier which you have any leverage against? I don't. Better get a physical SIM.
Oh, you do? It's still a single point of failure. Customer support servers down? Should have gotten a physical SIM.
Unbeatable servers? Good luck swapping eSIMs when you want to sell/throw away your phone abroad, out of range of internet. Should have gotten a phyical one.
Never out of range? Wonder what you do when your phone breaks and you have no one to babysit you through the process. Should have gotten physical.
Etc.
That's what an additional sigle point of failure means: less control over your own infrastructure.
If this actually happens to people in real life, let’s talk about it. All indications are that this problem isn’t a serious one yet.
New technologies often improve things in some way while introducing concerns and potential drawbacks in other ways. The question is whether, on balance, the new way is worth the risk.
My experience so far is that it is — it’s very convenient to be able to use a service like Airalo to order prepaid eSIMs for data service in foreign countries in advance. It makes traveling a joy now, and my wife is irritated a whole lot less by the prepaid SIM hunt I used to go on when traveling abroad. Plus no more tools or risking losing your SIM tray (or the SIM itself) when you swap it out on an airplane tray table.
It depends on how you define "serious". If it works for 99% people with a net positive and it doesn't work at all for 1%, is it serious enough to keep the old version?
My experience says that it will get steamrolled and the 1% left hanging, looking at significantly worse solutions, or none altogether.
A 1% failure rate would be huge. That's 1 out of every 100 customers. No rational carrier would tolerate that.
I know we all hate telcos and mobile phone carriers -- and a lot of their mistrust is quite frankly deserved -- but this seems like an edge case that most customers won't even run into. First they need to switch devices, which eliminates most customers, and then second, they need to experience some kind of failure on switch. If the failure rate is any higher than before, I would be surprised. But let's wait to see the data before we all go up in arms.
My carrier is currently not doing eSIM. Also some low cost carriers can’t be contacted in any other way than a chat. Which is a problem in many real world situations if you need an eSIM asap. Sometimes there is no one in the chat available at all.
If your carrier doesn’t support eSIM, then this discussion doesn’t apply to you. Carriers aren’t going to make eSIM available until they have the support structure available to make it useful to customers.
I guess eSIM is still a luxury for now so they want to milk it. I have only ever heard of first time activation of a sim. Vodafone in NL requires an activation via their app, or phone, before first use. But I think that is normal. The last time I got a physical sim it was in 2013 and I have transferred the same sim across multiple phones since.
what's the migration process for eSIMs?