I woke up this morning after a good night’s sleep wondering why we needed SIMs. Sure, eSIMs are coming out but the whole concept is tied pretty well to what ‘SIM’ stands for: Subscriber Information Module.
It’s not really for users, it’s for the company selling a service. As someone who has spent time in telephony, it just seems very strange to me that we’re still dealing with iterations of SIM cards for phones that aren’t really phones anymore.
They’re computing devices. SIM cards allow access to a network, but… why do we need a version of a SIM card at all? Certainly they provide the service providers with an easy way to handle subscriptions, but there has to be another way. We have biometrics, we have a phone’s MAC address since all phones seem to come with wifi these days… so it begs the question, aside from making things easier for telecommunications providers, why are we clinging to iterations of the standard?
There was a time when I remembered loads of phone numbers of friends and relatives in my head and would dial them as I needed them – but a phone number, too, is pretty much the same as a domain name.
It would be good to just pull up a device, see what providers are available and their pricing, pick one, and move forward without all the unnecessary stuff like changing phone numbers, etc.
It seems to me that we could really make a quantum leap in mobile technology just by allowing the SIM card to go quietly into the night and moving beyond it. The time for telephone numbers seems antiquated as it is, and iterating the SIM card into software seems a good first step… but it only really works for the people who make phones and sell mobile services.
They’re not really phones anymore. They’re computing devices that attach to a network. Maybe we should stop making them so special. The difference between a laptop with a webcam and microphone and a phone or tablet is only really the SIM and the size.
Why not just make it so any computing device can do the same thing? Any device I use could do what my ‘phone’ can.
‘Phone’ seems such an antiquated concept.