Dual eSim Technology Considered (by me)
What Apple introduced with the iPhone 14 Pro could be the beginning of unraveling the convoluted cellular network, and the companies that control it.
I wrote this newsletter without any help from ChatGPT, which wrote this version. It took me a lot longer. You get to judge which one is worth the time to read (and write!)
I got the iPhone 14 Pro Max last week. Because I bought it from Apple without a carrier contract, I was able to get a different carrier on each eSim line: one from Verizon with my usual cell phone number and one from AT&T with a new number. It’s like having two phones in one device: Wow!
This strikes me as a core event in the life of cell phones (and carriers). I haven’t figured out how it works just yet, but I suspect that this is the beginning of the end of carrier’s control over the phone itself. Here is my experience with having two phones in one device:
*I sent a text message from one eSim to the other. It took 5 minutes for the text to arrive; I don’t know why it took so long and clearly Apple is confused because it marked it as an iMessage when it arrived. Did it travel across the SMS network or did it stay in the iMessage network? 🤷🏼♂️
*I have to designate one line as the default for both calling and texting. But the iPhone has a setting called “Allow Cellular Data Switching”, which in theory lets you switch from one line to another for data, if the other line has better data service.
*I can associate one line with calling any one individual in my contacts. But this is sort of like having different ring tones for certain individuals: Do you really need to have a different ring tone (or call with a different number) for certain individuals? (I have >20,000 contacts on my phone, at least half of which are duplicates, thanks to Apple or Google or Microsoft mis-managing my contact database at different times over the past 15 years, but that’s a topic for a different newsletter.)
In other words, I haven’t figured out what this means yet or even how useful it us. For instance, in Santa Fe, NM, a relatively small town with spotty cell service, I got a 5G signal on both lines but the data connection didn’t work on either line. (I couldn’t call or text either, rendering the phone useless for communicating in that moment; Indeed, we all know that there is a wide swath of Santa Fe that reports 5G connections but neither voice nor data works.)
Indeed, Apple does not appear to know how this works either, since it’s support document is mired in “you can” land. What I mean is that it tells you all the things that “you can” do without any notion that these things are actually useful or realistic.
The next step in this evolution is clearly to remove any notion that the carriers own your number. In theory, this is already true with “number portability”, but moving your number from one carrier to another to save money is the domain of anal retentive people who really care about saving money, i.e. not me (or most people?).
But imagine that the way you receive calls is ultimately divorced from a “telephone number”, which is really just a numerical construct used to establish a connection through a network. I can’t tell you how this would work, but it would have to be similar to how an email reaches you or how web sites know who you are. The network knows.
That releases you from all the bonds of being locked into a contract with a company. Just like internet access and video streaming.
Did you read what ChatGPT thought I would write on this topic? Who did a better job?
Dual eSim Technology Considered (by me)
Great insights re the divorce of numbers, carrier, and phones.
I like them both. Although the chatGP one is more concise, yours is more personable. I do think the chatGP one hits most points more clearly. It’s not quizzical about what the future might hold, and it addresses the main point which is really international calling. As someone who goes abroad often and has had to deal with 2 phones and several SIM cards for another country(ies)… I think that’s the main thing. Carriers allowing a person to use his cell as a sort of an IP address is more what you alude to. The phone should just be like your IP but you should be able to have another way to call that would work across platforms like a url that would be DNS’d to your number. Or something along those lines. We’re getting close to that being feasible technically and politically.