Your Next Phone Could Make It Super Easy to Switch Carriers

All thanks to a potential partnership between Apple and Samsung.

CC BY-SA 2.5/Feureau

If you've ever tried to take the same phone with you from one carrier to another, you probably know all about SIM cards, their benefits and their downsides. But, if we're all lucky, a supposed partnership between Apple and Samsung could put an end to traditional SIM cards for good, and replace them with something much better

A SIM card is a tiny little chip that sits inside most phones and identifies you to your mobile service provider. Your phone gets the service, but your SIM card lets the towers determine which phone is yours. It's also where your phone number lives. It's like a little removable brain. 

If you want to go from one phone to another, it sometimes is as easy as just removing the SIM from your current phone and putting it in the next, but there are all kinds of problems you can run into. You can't use the SIM you got from AT&T to get service from T-Mobile, for instance. And you can't use a T-Mobile SIM in a phone that's locked to AT&T. Some carriers, like Verizon, don't even use SIMs you can remove, so you're just stuck unless you upgrade your phone through them. And don't even think about leaving the United States, at which point it all gets 10 times more complicated. It's all a confusing mess, and it has been for a while. 

But the end could be in sight. When Apple put out its iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, it came with a special Apple SIM card for data connections. Unlike a wireless service provider, Apple doesn't care if you switch between T-Mobile and AT&T or whatever else, so it let its iPad cards work with pretty much any provider (at least until carriers started screwing it up). 

you could take your phone to whatever service you want

Now, according to a report from Financial Times, Apple and Samsung are partnering to try and bring a similar system to phones. The idea is that instead of a traditional SIM card, your phone would have an embedded and electronic "e-SIM" that you'd never have to pop out; instead you could just have it reprogrammed to work with whatever service you want. 

The rise of an e-SIM would make life a lot easier for folks who want to move from service to service and bring their phones with them, but it wouldn't make it trivial. Carriers could (and probably will) still lock you in with a contract. Still, a universal SIM standard would make it easier to switch, and the less carrier lock-in there is, the more all those carriers have to compete to keep your business, and competition is always good for you. So far carriers have held out against tech like this for exactly that reason, but if anything can topple them, it's a partnership between the two hardware juggernauts that are Apple and Samsung.

Source: Financial Times via 9to5Mac

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