Qualcomm announced a new collaboration with Vodafone and Thales to develop a new iSIM technology, which will add to eSIM (embedded SIM) and vSIM (Virtual SIM) technologies. These technologies are designed to reduce the use of physical SIM cards.
According to Qualcomm, iSIM technology is somewhat similar to eSIM in that it uses embedded chips integrated into the body of the device to enable communication. Qualcomm was on hand to demonstrate the technology using a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 5G phone powered by a Snapdragon 888 processor, which allows phones to connect to devices without a physical SIM card or dedicated chip.
Evolution of the SIM card
Today, the penetration rate of mobile phones is very high. According to data from IResearch, the penetration rate of smartphones reached 95.6% in 2019, which is the dominant position in China's mobile phone market. And one of the things that people who have been using mobile phones for years will notice is that the SIM card is getting smaller and smaller.
In 1991, the world's first SIM card was born in Germany. With the continuous development of mobile communication technology, SIM cards are also evolving. The earliest 1G SIM card only has a user capacity of 3KB and only supports voice calls. The 4G SIM card has a user capacity of 500KB, which is the most familiar SIM card at present. The typical representative is the NFC card of China Mobile, which can support some extended applications such as transportation and finance.
From 1G SIM card to 4G SIM card, the main form of change is not only the capacity is gradually larger, but also the shape size is constantly decreasing.
Early SIM cards were often referred to as large cards, standard cards or Pr phone cards. In 2003, the European Telecommunications Standards Association introduced the smaller Micro SIM. However, it was not popular at the beginning due to user habits, until 2010, when the iPhone 4 adopted this specification card slot, and gradually spread.
The smaller Nano SIM card became popular with the iPhone 5, and today, many smartphones already support the Nano SIM card.
Now it has expanded to 5G SIM, which has a capacity of 32GB to 128GB, more than 260,000 times that of 4G SIM, allowing SIM to store mobile files such as recruitment and videos.
In addition, there is another form of SIM card mutation, which is to embed the SIM card directly into the device instead of using a physical card. This is called eSIM. Smaller and smaller SIM cards can free up more valuable space for devices, and eSIM is part of this thinking.
ISIM is an upgrade over eSIM, with the SIM card embedded directly into the SoC of the phone, allowing more space.
ISIM has many advantages over traditional SIM cards or eSIM. In addition to those mentioned above, eSIM has some of the same capabilities as iSIM, and by inheriting SIM directly into the processor, it also paves the way for mobile services to be integrated into devices outside the phone. In the future, laptops, tablets, AR/VR and other devices will be able to connect directly to the current cellular network.
Stalled in the Chinese market for physical SIM cards
While the iSIM card has many great features, including the ability to continue using eSIM's infrastructure to configure user ID cards, it also makes it easier for users to switch mobile carriers. But just because of these convenience, domestic carriers will not open the mobile phone to use iSIM or eSIM technology.
This is not because of technical difficulties. At present, the three major domestic operators have basically opened the eSIM function on smartwatches, and there is almost no technical threshold to transplant the technology in watches to smart phones. In other words, the slow promotion of eSIM in China is not a technical problem.
The fate of iSIM, which is similar to eSIM technology, is not expected to change much in China. The main reason is that mobile operators worry that the high viscosity of user dependency created by SIM cards will be broken by eSIM or iSIM technology, which allows users to switch carriers freely.
Domestic operators have for years relied on physical SIM cards to bind customers to "long-term contracts" that ensure profits. Even after the implementation of the number transfer network, the operators also set up multiple checkpoints.
The emergence of eSIM and iSIM will undoubtedly break the market position between operators and users, and lead to the change of operators' long-term business model.
In addition, if the embedded SIM cards such as eSIM and iSIM can easily adjust the relevant data of users, operators need to make technical preparation, increase investment in database construction, expand and transform the existing equipment, and do well in the management of billing and number query.
In addition, our mobile phone numbers are now tied to too many industries, such as banking, securities, insurance and other third-party platforms. To ensure user experience, these platforms need to be transformed as well. As a result, the technology, while convenient, has few benefits for businesses and only adds to costs.
However, for terminal manufacturers, the arrival of eSIM and iSIM is obviously more beneficial than disadvantageous. It not only saves space, facilitates design, reduces enterprise cost and design difficulty. And with these technologies, it will allow phone makers to connect everything directly through physical means, rather than connecting to smart devices in a circle through the Internet.
Although carriers do not open eSIM on mobile phones, the technology is already widely used in iot terminals. Of course, the growth of SIM cards on mobile phones hasn't stopped.