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Home EXPLAINERS

What is an eSIM?

Kelan Reay by Kelan Reay
December 17, 2022
What is an eSIM?
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eSIM technology has been the talk of the town in recent months, thanks to Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro in September this year. The flagship models run exclusively with eSIM tech baked into them and are devoid of flimsy SIM tray gimmicks. Well, at least the ones sold in the US market.

You might think these eSIMs are the next generation of telephonic capabilities in phones, but they’ve been around for a while. They first made an appearance with the launch of the Motorola Razr and have since increased in availability with multiple smartphone manufacturers as well as mobile carriers offering support.

But what exactly is an eSIM and should you rely on one? We’ll give you all the details and more in the coming lines.

How Do Traditional SIM cards Work?

Traditional SIM cards as almost everyone would know are based on a card infrastructure. You simply insert the SIM card into the SIM tray on your device and voila you can avail of the mobile services of that carrier.

The benefit of a SIM card is the ability to swap it out as and when you need to. This can be extremely useful in instances where you’re travelling to a new country and you want to avoid excessive roaming charges levied by your default carrier.

You can purchase a SIM card at the airport of your destination, swap it out with your current one and voila, you can avail of all of the available carrier services in that region seamlessly. 

Or what if your phone dies or it’s malfunctioning? In that case, you could easily pry out your existing SIM card and insert it into an alternate device and still be able to make and receive calls.

Traditional SIM cards can be swapped out easily

This swapping feature with SIM cards is the reason they have been popular for decades. In previous instances, before the smartphone became as powerful as it is now, you were even able to store contact information on your SIM card. 

Modern smartphone devices however now come with sizeable storage options so the need to store contacts on a SIM card has become pretty much redundant, which begs the need for having a swappable SIM card. Why have the whole mechanism of swapping it out to switch to a different carrier?

After all, these SIM cards are pretty delicate to handle, and their tiny size makes them easy to misplace. How about having just a standard SIM card that can reprogram itself whenever you switch a carrier?

That way there would be no need for searching for a paper clip every time you need to swap out to a new SIM card. All you’d need to do is simply scan a QR code to move to a new carrier and that’s it. Well, that’s where eSIMs come in.

What's the deal with eSIMs?

An eSIM as the name suggests stands for embedded Subscriber Identity Module. It works like a standard SIM card, except that it is directly soldered to your smartphone’s motherboard, rather than being seated within a SIM tray.

This is in line with how your phone’s storage and battery make the list of non-removable items within a smartphone.

The benefit of an eSIM is that it is reprogrammable. Which means the same card could be used for multiple carriers. This makes the process of switching to a different carrier much more effortless and seamless. It also saves you the hassle of fiddling around with a flimsy SIM tray.

These eSIMs have been around for a while and made their appearances in devices such as the Google Pixel 2 and Motorola Razr which came out more than 5 years ago. Notable recent appearances have been in devices such as the Apple Watch Series 3 which makes sense as an eSIM would take up lesser space making it suitable to the device’s portable watch form factor.

You can also find eSIMs in most cars these days where they offer multiple features such as remotely being able to turn on or off your car, switching the AC on to pre-cool the car, geofencing etc. You’ll also find them in smart appliances such as Google Nest devices and Amazon Alexa-based speakers.

In the smartphone space, adoption has been much slower due to the multiple benefits a traditional SIM card offers, which still cannot be completely fulfilled by an eSIM. For now, this technology is mostly restricted to the higher-end devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S22 series, the iPhone 14 series etc. However, like most of the up-and-coming technology in smartphones, we should see eSIMs eventually widely available in most price segments.

What are the advantages and drawbacks of eSIMs?

The major disadvantage of the eSIM ironically is also one of its strong points. And that is the fact that you cannot remove the eSIM at all. In instances where your phone dies and you need to make a call or send a text, this can put you at a rather sour disadvantage to traditional SIM users.

The technology that powers SIM cards also tracks your location and this can be irksome to the privacy-conscious. After all who would like their location at every instant be known? Of course, with a non-removable SIM card you could just take it out but as mentioned earlier that’s not an option with an eSIM.

However, this is also a win situation when it comes to smartphone thefts as the criminals can be tracked. This would also make it handy in situations where you’ve misplaced your device.

Another advantage of eSIMs is on the manufacturing side of things. Removing the physical slim slot frees up space for manufacturers to optimize smartphone designs such as reducing the size of bezels on displays and improving the aesthetic. Additional space is also freed up for other components such as larger batteries etc. It’s also one less way for dust or other containments to enter your device.

For individuals who shuttle between countries frequently, eSIMs offer a major advantage in terms of ease of switching to a new SIM card. With an eSIM, all you have to do once you land is simply scan a QR code and you will be able to avail all of the benefits of the local carrier. No hassle of prying out the SIM tray and fiddling with the small cards.

Should you switch to an eSIM?

The iPhone 14 series solid in the US market features a dual eSIM set up , via apple.com

With the rapid innovation and change that has driven the smartphone industry in the last decade, the SIM card is one of the few mobile components that has remained mostly unchanged. Sure we’ve figured out a way to downsize them to the now widely available nano-SIM cards but for the most part, the functionality has stayed the same.

This is also the reason for the slow adoption of eSIMs in major smartphone markets such as India. Which makes you wonder if the functionality is the same do you really need to switch to an eSIM?

Well, the answer to this question depends on your use case. If you’re someone who travels often or is privacy conscious then switching to an eSIM-equipped device makes sense. And most eSIM devices these days do come with a physical SIM tray option as well, except the iPhone 14 models sold in the US.

So you can still go for a device with eSIM tech which would be good for travel purposes when you want to switch to a local carrier to avoid roaming charges. You’d still have the flexibility of having a physical SIM card although this would negate the benefits offered by an eSIM-only device due to the space taken up with the physical slot. 

At the end of the day, I wouldn’t say switching to an eSIM is a necessary option, because if I’m being honest it still cannot quite replace the traditional SIM card. But it looks like a step in the direction and with greater adoption, in the coming years, we should see it become a more viable replacement.

Kelan Reay

Kelan Reay

Kelan is an avid car and tech enthusiast! His other hobbies include reading Harry Bosch novels, playing the guitar, and watching Formula 1 races.

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