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Hello, it’s Jake here your friendly virtual neighbourhood SpiderMa…..Managed Service provider and I wanted to talk about eSIMs today and precisely what it has to do with modern-day business operators or technology users. And extending that idea to finding the right managed service provider.
So for those of us who don’t know what the eSIM is. The eSim is a technology that can download a virtual SIM card instead of a physical one.
Now for a lot of people, when confronted with this topic, are going to say things like: “who cares,” “what does this actually mean to me,” or “why does it matter that this device that I’m retailing or this application that I’m selling need to have a virtual SIM card.”
So I’m going to use what I’m good at and break it down a little more philosophically as to how we should be approaching the idea of an eSIM within a modern business world. Or even just a world of software and connectivity in general.
So let’s start the breakdown, and it is actually pretty simple and straight to look precisely what s physical SIM card does before we get into the eSIM. We’ve all handled a SIM card before; it’s necessary to get your mobile ‘online’ connected to a network. Such a little forgettable and straightforward piece of equipment holds the key to all the connectivity in the world. The sim card essentially stores your subscriber information. And they come in really handy when your battery dies. It needs some recharging, so you can basically take the sim card out and place it into another phone and continue connectivity on another device because subscriber information connects you. Or perhaps when roaming in different countries, you could use multiple SIM cards to get the best rate away from home.
So what makes the eSIM much more powerful is that it allows you to stop thinking about connectivity in the way we traditionally have. You don’t need a physical piece of hardware to connect to the device anymore. Your subscription is virtual; instead of being bound with hardware and mobiles. You can actually start thinking about how subscriber information is connected for your clients in a much more virtual and much more software-based, which allows for greater flexibility if you are trying to compete in high-paced IoT markets. Your authentication and subscribing are stored with a virtual digital signature.
Now Canadian wireless carriers have basically all started to support the eSIM technology. And it’s something to keep in mind when you’re actually trying to develop your platform or develop your IoT solution. Do you want to have to be forcing your clients or yourself to create a device or box that you need to connect to the wireless frequency of these carriers? Or potentially using anything else that’s already connected to those networks and using your own eSIM to manage subscription. It potentially reduces the footprint of development you need to consider.
This starts to get a little more abstract. We begin to think about the eSIM as virtually mobile versus actually needing the traditional mobile device. You can be an eSIM subscriber and take your connectivity from device to device to device, seemingly without having that standard SIM card plugged in. The applications for seamless connectivity start to grow.
The idea is that you can create gated connectivity as a subscriber to a specific network that is seamless without physical interference. So you could have, let’s say, an agnostic network connectivity device at the local pool, and you wanted to go inside, so you punch in your 4 digit pin, and you scan your RFID, and now your subscription has been activated to use the pool. Now, of course, the software allows this, but is there software that allows this over global networks independent of carrier? Pretty boring example but pretty cool where the technology starts to show us what it can do.
This starts to give us far more flexibility when trying to think about how we navigate and create beautiful and usable software for the IoT universe. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna become a service provider or service carrier. Still, the core elements will allow you to have a highly agnostic way of looking at subscription activities that IoT will be mighty at doing.
For instance, an enjoyable way to look at how this could work is that you pretend you had a bunch of eSIM subscriptions assigned to you. All of those subscriptions could be managed in something akin to a LastPass or a Dashlane password management solution. So you could have your key chain of certified eSIMs, which allows you to access different networks across different solutions, so you don’t have to have that one carrier-bound network. You can be more abstract, private and fluid in nature as you use the Internet. You could be more secure because now individual subscriptions and individual packages and even individual software can actually be run on different ‘vlans’ over various networks entirely with ease. This is where it starts to cool…
This allows software creators, designers and futurists to look at how we as individual people interact with networks. It allows us to create different ways of connecting people and the software solutions that they’re trying to use to make their lives better and, of course, keep them more secure. It is a lot easier to secure one application with one eSIM subscription than to secure an entire device with potential vulnerabilities.
Now those in the security industry are probably going to say, “aw Jake, that’s what you know… there’s a whole load of things that could go wrong there,” and I agree this is a really early take on what’s possible. I’m not trying to define necessarily what the security parameters are of securing an individual app running its own network with its own subscription base, but it sure sounds fun! However, I know from my years in telecommunications and IT, fewer moving parts are easier to secure.
Additionally, Since we’ve moved into a world of IPV 6, which we actually did quite some time ago, most people don’t really realize it. We’ve entered a world where there is the ability to have trillions and trillions of IP addresses meaning that individual software apps can be secured now in ways that we never thought of before in ways that we never thought we could do before. And even route its traffic in ways that can be much cleaner solely based on IPs rather than the ports or packet detection. The actual number of IPs available for IPv6 is 340 trillion IP addresses, and that is an astounding amount of places that can be home or hosts on the Internet.
So now imagine if we can take this eSIM technology and start applying it to smaller, more direct networks that allow us to move within the larger world of the Internet. We’re looking at a whole new way of seeing software designed by up-and-coming businesses, purely by having a more flexible network.
So how does this apply to you, a user, a business owner, a software creator or a thinker? Well, you can start to look at software and networks a little bit LESS differently than you did before. You can begin to look at your software spanning a network in a way that’s more fluid and a little bit more controllable and allows you to have user endpoints that don’t actually have to be the user’s home, mobile or workspace. We can start to include the entire environment that a user exists within daily as the place their software lives, functions and collects data.
This is an elegant way of thinking when you start to look at the software that will begin to impact our lives, with the horizon full of artificial intelligence, machine learning, adaptive technologies and systems of software that have the foresight to let us know how it’s going to behave before we even know it is. There’s a mouthful for the brain!
In our industry of business phone systems, unified communications, MSP’s, IT support and managed services. These open concepts are fascinating to start looking at how we can help our customers better navigate a world that is actually becoming online and is not regulated to the mobile device. It opens up new possibilities to enable managed service customers to access their software in unconventional ways. In ways that typically beforehand seemed insecure and now potentially can have the grounds to be argued that they are secure inherently by their eSIM subscription network while even being attached to an agnostic wireless network.
This allows for more options for security of data and user privacy while in the world of extremely high data usage. And is actually akin in nature to what Apple is currently doing on their iOS platform; they are making it harder for apps to gather data about apps you use. Just think how more things could be secured if each app had its own secure network… Crazy right…
As times have changed quite rapidly to remote work and work from home environments and as covid will eventually subside. While governments around world businesses around the world start to push to a back to pre 2020 work environment. It is impossible to say that remote work or work from home will be entirely gone. As a society, we’ve proved that as business owners, as employees, as people, we can work just as effectively, if not better, from home or anywhere. Which will further push the idea of remote connectivity over agnostic wireless carriers with smaller, more independent eSIM subscriptions.
Allowing us to create a more harmonious work world. This is extremely exciting for someone such as myself who spends a lot of their time helping people create easy work from home solutions, easy ways to communicate with their peers and their colleagues and easy ways for their remote anywhere software solutions to be managed.
While the first software that uses eSIM as a subscription base is still far from the mainstream world’s use case. It’s still something that telecommunications and managed service providers need to start thinking about to provide the best service possible for their clients. It’s important to start realizing the change that new technologies will bring and bring quite rapidly.
We’re not going to be waiting 80 years for this technology to be realized. We actually might be learning it in about 5 years as things become more fluid and people start working from a stranger and more remote places. Having a software/network that securely can be connected to networks globally and can build in that network subscription price alongside the cost of their software will be very high in demand.
So when looking for a managed service provider, look for one who looks to the future while also having a firm understanding of the future was created. It’s important that your managed service provider can be flexible and offer you unique solutions tailored to your business needs. Don’t be afraid to ask your managed service provider to come up with the craziest, most outlandish wildest, most futuristic possible way of helping you accomplish your goals. You would be surprised at how many managed service providers and communications providers but actually jumped at the chance to create something for you or create a work environment for you that’s truly unique and honestly forward-thinking. Managed service providers are virtual office managers; ask us how we can make things great…
At Portal, this is precisely what we try to do every day for our customers. We try to look at things a little bit. Differently, we try to make sure that our customers will have the future proof they need in their technologies and that their technology is working for them and not the other way around.
Suppose you want to learn more about eSIM and the emerging technology, I highly recommend subscribing to our blog and looking at the forums on GSMN. There are tons of initiatives going on right now to grow the use cases of eSIM, and being part of that and having your company be a part of it will make you all that much more competitive. Over 130 major industry players support the eSIM initiative companies like Sony, Rogers, LG, Nokia, ARM, Telenor, and Microsoft are all driving towards this world. If you, as a business owner or user, start to identify places where you can see your business, your software, and success being hinged on this concept that we’ve been talking about. I highly recommend taking a look and starting doing some reading yourself on the industry.
If you have any questions about this post or just want to talk about it, please connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or directly through Portal. It is an exciting new framework for emerging that’s going to be able to supplant what we currently have and create a brighter, faster, more connected universe in secure and exciting ways for everybody.