eSIM with Beecham Research
On this week’s episode of Real World IoT, our host Ken Briodagh speaks with Robin Duke-Woolley about eSIM technology. Robin is the CEO of Beecham Research and has been in the telecommunications business for the last 40 years. Starting off in industry, he then moved onto analysis and consulting and has now been working in M2M and IoT since 2001. Robin more recently created Beecham Research which is a market research and consulting firm that focuses entirely on IoT and M2M.
Benefits of eSIM
In the cellular world, we have had mobile SIM cards in devices essentially forever. The SIM card is oriented towards those handsets but are not well made for IoT devices. Making sure the SIM and device are getting to the same place at the same time can be very logistically difficult to do. Since it cannot be implemented at manufacturing due to no one being sure of where the SIMs will end up, then at the moment this logistically difficult system is used. In another case, eSIM is a blank and is put in during manufacturing so when it reaches the point of use, it comes online, bootstraps to its mobile operator and then all the information is downloaded. This new system really streamlines the usual way of implementing SIM into devices. This new way is so much more flexible because rather than replace the whole SIM card in the device, all it takes is a slight change of code to edit who can use it and what network it should be connected to. This is all especially helpful with IoT devices, especially in remote locations. With eSIM, you are not completely bound to the MNO or MVNO you are using for its service. This way if you are able to get a better deal at the end of a contract period with a provider, you are able to switch over all of your eSIM connected devices without having to replace the SIM in each device which would take a lot of time and money.
Places of Improvement
With eSIM there needs to be some sort of standardization to avoid technical confusion. The biggest thing that eSIM specifications doesn’t really cover is the commercial arrangements between mobile operators. Unless you have the specific key codes and pieces of network information from those operators, you wouldn’t be able to switch providers anyways. So since this part is running behind, despite many network operators being understanding, there is still a way to go in providing a secure way of switching between providers reliably. A place where eSIM is very beneficial is in the use case of needing multiple providers on a single device. This is possible on these devices however there is no standard and they are all proprietary systems. Since multiple providers is more meant for mobile devices, it doesn’t seem like it will be too big of an issue when it comes to eSIM.
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