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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

Seeing how impossible it is to get the Apple Watch on non-"partner" networks, I'm very wary about all the supposed market reforms that are expected of eSIM. I'm expecting the exact opposite will happen, with more "carrier exclusives" and stuff like that to try to squeeze money out of customers. Just look at how things worked out with ESNs on CDMA carriers in the US.

Physical SIM cards have worked fantastically well and were one of the greatest ideas of GSM.

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Apple Watch being tied to specific carriers has more to do with the feature set required by Apple (primarily, sharing the same MSISDN between the iPhone and the Watch) than anything directly related to the eSIM.

I would imagine that they (Apple) simply had no appetite for dealing with the user experience corner cases of your Watch having a completely separate identity.

There is precedent for this being relaxed over time and in future revisions of the Watch. For example, Visual Voicemail used to be a requirement for iPhone carriers. Today, no such requirements exist.

The fact is that as a owner of the hardware, Apple is not giving me any access to swap out the eSIM to whatever I want. They control access to the eSIM.

If they had implemented the watch with a physical SIM (using, say, pair SIMs which have existed since the 90's), I could crack it open and put in whatever SIM card I wanted.

I envision an eSIM iPhone having a beautiful carrier selection portal with gorgeous, high-resolution carrier logos... and only Apple partner carriers, with specific iPhone-tailored plans. Goodbye my discount MVNO.

What's a "pair SIM"? It appears ungooglable.

Is this what kalleboo is referring to https://kyivstar.ua/en/mm/services/voice/sim_pair ?

> Incoming calls, messages etc. can be taken only by one of the mobile terminals, in which SIM-card is in so-called “active” state. Accordingly, SIM-card in another mobile terminal is passive and any outgoing operations can be made from this device.

> To transfer basic SIM-card into active state it is necessary to dial 1071#. combination on mobile device keyboard. In this case extra SIM-card automatically transfers into passive mode. To transfer extra SIM-card into active state it is necessary to dial 1072#. combination on mobile device keyboard. In this case basic SIM-card automatically transfers into passive mode.

Yeah, I can understand why Apple didn't go down this path.

Seems to be a restriction of that particular carrier. I used multi / pair sims regularly years ago on several German networks (I.e. for car phones) and they would all ring on incoming calls. However only one card would receive SMS messages. But that should not have been a problem since iOS can already share them between devices.

Sort of related, I have a second sim card with t-mobile US that allows for calling, receiving and sending texts, all from my primary number. This was the other part of their DIGITS beta.

> For example, Visual Voicemail used to be a requirement for iPhone carriers. Today, no such requirements exist.

I forgot to reply to this part. Visual Voicemail was never a requirement if I just put my own SIM card in. The SIM card was always a run-around any stupid policies. Only with eSIM now that backdoor is closed.

>"I forgot to reply to this part. Visual Voicemail was never a requirement if I just put my own SIM card in."

Can you elaborate on this, whats the connection between visual vm and the SIM?

I think parent meant that a SIM phone can just be used by any carrier, regardless of support for it... I wouldn't need an "iPhone carrier", just "whatever any-phone carrier" for my iPhone... Some features like vvm would not work, but f it.

An eSIM might need that now I can only pick carriers with explicit support for my particular phone.

Oh I see because the VM storage is carrier specific. I think that might be an issue for many people.

What do physical SIMs have to do with business deals? GSM carriers using physical SIM cards had carrier exclusive phones for ages.

Verizon was refusing enrollment of phones in their network of people bought them elsewhere. Something that was unheard of here in Europe where carriers got no say in the choice of your phone - pop in a SIM card and that's it.

Apple Watch eSIM lockdown is showing again that not having SIMs will significantly hurt customers again.

A bunch of US "mobile network virtual operators" created GSM phones that only worked with their SIMs and so on. It's the regulatory requirements and enforcement that lead to interoperability more than the technology.

There are plenty of differences between the US and European phone markets, with simcard-less CDMA phones being the least of concern.

Can you elaborate more? Because not being able to buy your own phone at your own price seems to be a huge concern in a free market.

IIRC AT&T, a GSM carrier with SIM cards, had the iPhone exclusively and was locked for it's lifetime.

In Australia, all three GSM carriers had the iPhone and could be unlocked just by calling up (now they come unlocked out of the box, even when purchased on contract).

Having a physical SIM card here never made a difference to carrier exclusives because that's a business deal, not a technical constraint. The US telecommunications market is a bit of an anomaly compared to most other countries.

Also worth nothing that the EU is fairly regulation heavy on the carriers, which has worked out mostly well, requiring phones to be unlocked/banning locked phones, requiring things like everyone use the same standards, easy/cheap/free roaming between countries, etc. If eSIMs became a thing and carriers started locked them and making them exile, it would be easy to envision the EU mandating consumers able to take a phone between carriers.

It was for the lifetime of the contract. Once the device was paid off, you could unlock the device.

AT&T didn't allow those with off-contract iPhones to unlock them until April 8, 2012, so there was a few years there where you could have a paid-off device still locked to AT&T.

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/06/att-will-unlock-off-con...

This wasn't initially the case with the original iPhone.

I might be remembering wrong, but I think the original iPhone has some sort of technical constraints working on T-Mobile's network even if it was unlocked.

Might be because T-Mobile is on a different set of bands (that iirc are closer to the bands that are used internationally).

Yes, that was it IIRC. I recall that using the original iPhone/early model iPhones didn't support the bands that T-Mobile used for 3G(?) so you were limited to 2G on T-Mobile. My memory is fuzzy and its something difficult to Google.

And at the time the 2G on TMobile was just as fast if not faster than ATT 3G which was ironic.

When? That hasn't been the case in a long time. I've had Verizon for almost six years and as far as I remember I've never bought my phone from them, always brought my own, it's never been a problem. In fact, the phone I have now is a model they don't even sell. I just bought an unlocked phone.

When Verizon only offered subsidized plans I don't even think it would be in Verizon's best interest to refuse to enroll outside phones, the person would be paying the subsidized price no matter what.

CDMA is being phased out in the US and (IIRC) 4G is a GSM technology, I don't believe my phone even supports CDMA?? AT&T and T-Mobile have always been GSM only and AT&T used to carrier lock their phones.

Either way, the carrier lock isn't an issue of phone technology, carriers can always lock out "unapproved" devices at their level.

4G GSM is WCDMA. Your phone supports it.

> When? That hasn't been the case in a long time

When they were still primarily a CDMA carrier. The only reason they changed is because they adopted 4G LTE (which is in the GSM/3GPP family) which uses SIM cards. Proving the point.

There are some cases where this is still a problem. voLTE is left up to the carrier on how they'll implement it. There are cases of phones with proper band support not working on Verizon due to lack of carrier provisioning. The fallback for calls is cdma if the phone isn't whitelisted or lacks a proper carrier file.

To this day there are still people calling into verizon to get certain import models whitelisted.

A thread for better context: https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/5uvrko/how_to_use_...

Without swappable SIMs you only have carrier exclusive phones.

The article itself contradicts that. You can switch carriers with an eSIM, and these operators were trying to prevent that.

Physical SIM cards are not a requirement for unlocked phones.

From TFA:

>The technology replaces the usual card with a chip that uses software to associate you with a given service provider. On top of freeing up room inside devices (crucial for wearables like the Apple Watch or Gear S3), it makes it much easier to switch carriers -- you could sign up for a new network without even talking to another human being. And it's that last part that reportedly has the companies scared.

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