Traditional SIM cards have been here with us since 1991, allowing us to connect our devices such as phones and tablets to mobile networks. It is now time to shake and refresh this old friend of ours a bit.
Deutsche Telekom and the telco sector through GSMA is working on revolutionizing this tiny card. The next generation solution is called eSIM — where the ‘e’ stands for ‘embedded’.
This innovation wipes away the physical SIM cards and slots, as it becomes a single, embedded chip. This brings the benefit that no more cards need to be swapped to use a different subscription in your phone — also saving the hassle of the different SIM size standards, and the adaptors helping you to overcome this issue.
It also makes the phone designers happier than before, as they can finally get rid of those big and ugly SIM trays — right after they killed other bugaboo: headphone jack connectors.
The pioneers of the new technology, the eSIM capable smartwatches, and the first mobile phones (e.g. Apple’s new iPhone lineup) are already on the market. However, it won’t be only phones and tablets that will support it, the spectrum is wide, from bicycles to cars, even IoT teddy bears can have an embedded SIM.
Multi Device Management through a mobile application
Deutsche Telekom walks the front line in the adoption of the eSIM technology. To help people understand how it will actually work, Telekom partnered with us to create a native Android application, that allows the management of eSIM capable devices and subscriptions — named the Multi Device Management (MDM) app.
Mito has been developing various mobile applications for Deutsche Telekom since 2014 — including the One App, the next generation self-care application of the European footprint.
The latest version of the MDM application was brought to the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, and will be presented at various venues taking place this year.
Deutsche Telekom chose to partner with BMW to demonstrate the power of the new technology. In the short video below — recorded on the MWC 2018 — Andreas Schulz from Telekom shows how easy it is to add a BMW i3 to the managed devices in the app, using a plain QR code (reading and pairing happens between 0:30–0:36).
When you have the car added to your profile, you are free to assign a subscription to it, so that you can use your personal communication and high speed internet on the road.
In the MDM project we have delivered the Android app, and a Java based backend solution that stores the device management related data, and also enables the communication between the mobile client, the Telekom CRM and provisioning systems.
The easy and handy management of the eSIM devices on your phone is not the future anymore. These devices are here, and together with Deutsche Telekom, we are prepared to serve the best experience to the customers.
The author(s)
Csaba Végső
Director of Business Development
Csaba has been with Mito Digital since 2012, currently working as the Director of Business Development. He has a deep technical background gained from managing enterprise-level web and mobile projects, especially for telco clients. Today he is diligently focused on establishing Mito Digital's international recognition in various industry verticals.
