Conclusion
While e-SIM may not yet have had the impact many people were predicting 12 or 24 months ago, it is certainly not a technology anyone should be taking their eyes off. At its core, e-SIM presents a solution to an issue that threatens to hold back the potential of mobile as consumer and enterprise markets alike look increasingly for universal, seamless connectivity solutions - how to automatically connect any device to any network wherever it goes, with no interruption in service.
Compared to the physical SIM, which has dominated the way cellular services are provisioned for three decades or more, the e-SIM represents a radically different way of operating. There are bound to be challenges and teething problems, not least because e-SIM will demand collaboration between operators, OEMs and system integrators at a scale never before seen in the mobile industry. Adopting the GSMA remote provisioning standard is just the start.
For mobile operators, e-SIM offers the opportunity to meet consumer demand for choice, convenience and flexibility in accessing mobile services. For MVNOs in particular, it creates further incentive to specialise in niche areas like travel or to develop bespoke data plans aimed for specific uses like video messaging and streaming. The option for consumers to run multiple services from the same device, or connect multiple devices to the same plan, opens up new opportunities for operators to diversify and differentiate.
In IoT, meanwhile, e-SIM solves a major logistical obstacle posed by removable SIM cards which has potentially held back IoT adoption - and where it hasn’t, has led to the development of proprietary soft SIM alternatives. Whether it is deploying industrial IoT sensors in factories and processing plants, connecting utilities and smart city infrastructure, installing infotainment and telematics systems in connected vehicles, enterprises do not want to be locked into network services, nor do they want to be faced with having to switch hundreds of different SIM cards in hundreds of different devices just to change provider.
For operators, e-SIM and the GSMA standard offers the chance to protect their stake in burgeoning IoT markets against proprietary connectivity solutions, whilst delivering more flexibility, reliability and security to end users. To OEMs, it means being able to build connected devices to a single specification and ship them anywhere in the world, safe in the knowledge that clients will be able to access any network service simply and conveniently via e-SIM.