New eSIMs Are Replacing Traditional SIM Cards for Mobile Phones | WSJ Tech News Briefing

[Music] this is your tech news briefing for tuesday july 26th i'm zoe thomas for the wall street journal the last time you switched cell phone carriers you might remember having to change out the sim card on your phone it's a process that typically requires finding something small like a safety pin paper clip maybe the back of an earring and inserting it into a tiny hole and then picking out a tiny chip out of the back of a tiny tray to replace it with a new one well those chips could soon become a thing of the past replaced by sim cards that let you activate service digitally joining us to discuss what this means for our phones and how we use them is our personal tech reporter dalvin brown hey dalvin thanks for coming back on the show yeah thanks for having me so start us off with some basics what is the purpose of a sim card we've heard about them for years but what do they actually do yeah so sim cards the little chips that you pop in and out of your phone when you're switching carriers or switching phones relay your user details to the carrier and they authenticate your cell phone so essentially they're letting the carrier know that the phone belongs to you and it enables you to make and receive phone calls text messages and use data on the phone okay so now we're going to be switching though to these embedded sims these e-sim cards what are the benefits of those versus the traditional sim cards so if you've ever had to take a sim card out of your phone you know that you need to find something really tiny really minuscule to pop the little card out the cards are so small that they're easy to lose it's also hard to switch carriers without going to a store or waiting for someone to ship you a new sim card and when you're traveling abroad you oftentimes may have to hunt down a local sim card so you're not paying roaming charges from your carrier back in the u.s so esims help alleviate each of those problems okay so those are all the annoyances we have to deal with but is there anything about an esim that makes it better i mean if i've got one of these in my say new phone now how will that kind of make my life easier yeah i think part of the story about esims is security and so esims are able to be updated if a vulnerability is found by the carrier with traditional sims that's not the case you can also have multiple accounts or profiles on an esim so if you want to switch between your work number and your personal number in a single device you can do that with esims whereas with sim cards that's not as easy to do what will this mean for the makers of cell phones will this change the way they develop the phones if there's a futurist in you that wants a smartphone that's even slimmer or that's more innovative then esims help the manufacturers get to that point because they're smaller than sim cards they allow the smartphone makers to create smaller more innovative devices it also gives you more space if you just want a bigger battery they can use that space from the sim card and the sim card tray to add space to your smartphone battery okay so i feel like cell phone carriers are always trying to get like a little bit more room in it right to like make the phone smaller and add other things that that makes sense but what about from a carrier's perspective i mean do they want it to be easier for us to switch yeah so some of the industry veterans that i talked to explained why a lot of people don't even know that their smartphones have esm capabilities the carriers haven't been so quick to market those and onboard everyone onto them however apple's recent iphone se shipped without sim cards already in the phone and so when that happened verizon for instance started to onboard more customers with e-sims so what apple and the smartphone makers are really in the driver's seat when it comes to pushing e-sims and the carriers are slowly getting on board some of the experts that i talked to also said that carriers benefit because they don't have to send as many sim cards out or the time that they would spend helping people put some cards in their phone helping people take the sim cards out is gone once those esims are embedded in your phone and you can't take those out i just want to pick up on one other thing you mentioned that was security i mean are these any more secure than traditional sim cards or maybe even less secure since they're activated remotely yeah so both sim cards and esims are vulnerable to bad actors sim cards have been hacked for years now and esims require access to the cloud which opens them up to breaches as well but the thing about esims is that you can update them over the air so if there is a security issue carriers or the cloud provider can patch those up over the air through software whereas if someone hacks your sim card today it's not as easy to correct that all right that was our reporter dalvin brown thanks for joining us dalvin thanks for having me and that's it for today's tech news briefing if you want more tech stories check out our website wsj.com and if you like our show please rate and review it you can do that wherever you get your podcasts i'm zoe thomas for the wall street journal thanks for listening [Music] [Music] you

Channel: WSJ News

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Id: 2durkOmFGl4

Length: 6min 4sec (364 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022