[Dwolb]

There are some solutions out that are in software that are "eSIM" which allow devices to switch carriers through an OTA update.

Also see a company called SIMless.

There's a lot of market momentum around SIM cards and it keeps a telco's offering really sticky. It is more effort for people to swap hardware instead of software.

[vidarh]

> There's a lot of market momentum around SIM cards and it keeps a telco's offering really sticky. It is more effort for people to swap hardware instead of software.

I'd love to see evidence of this. Switching SIMs is something non-technical users do regularly.

[Dwolb]

I'm afraid I don't have hard evidence. The logic is for normal cell phone use it's more friction to swap a SIM than to have the phone automatically switch network profiles (non-roaming) or for the user to switch network profiles via software setting.

For IoT cellular the logic is it's more effort to recall a device and swap a SIM card than to reprovision the SIM profile via a software dashboard.

I'm sure we could put our minds together to come up with a robust user study. Thoughts?

[vidarh]

It takes ~30 seconds to switch SIMs on my phone. Most phones I've had in the last 10 years have had dual SIM slots as well.

It's not swapping the SIMs that provides friction when changing providers.

> For IoT cellular the logic is it's more effort to recall a device and swap a SIM card than to reprovision the SIM profile via a software dashboard.

If you can reprovision it remotely, you're one flaw away from a hacker being able to reprovision it. Meanwhile, the SIM design means there's little reason you'd need to recall it rather than simply send out new SIMs and have users swap them in.