IoT Forum: Embedded SIM (eSIM)

Telecom Council meets monthly for lunch with dozens of telcos, vendors, startups and VCs. This month we will meet for lunch to debate if eSIM will make it easier to embed cellular radios in small devices, and make them globally portable.

  • Date: 7/6/2016 12:00 PM
  • Location KPMG, Santa Clara CA (Map)
Agenda, Attendee List, & Presentation files available to Telecom Council members in the library.

Description

Agenda, Attendee List and Presentations are available to members in the PRESENTATION LIBRARY plus a VIDEO RECAP from the demo companies

Silicon Valley, California, Jul 6, 2016/Meeting Recap/  Our self-proclaimed “loud guy in the room,” John Feland, CEO at Argus Insights moderated as hot a topic in telecom as currently exists today: the Almighty SIM chip–it’s legacy, the business models that support it, its role in authentication, early successful attempts to eliminate it and the inevitability of a SIMless world.



Present on our panel to give us perspectives from across the industry and the world were:

  • Tony Wyant, CTO at GigSky
  • Dejan Rasuo, Vice-President of IoT Connectivity and Subscription Management Business at Spirent Communications
  • Raviv Laor, Director of Strategy & Corporate Development at Simgo
  • Karl J. Weaver, OEM Business Development Director North America & Northeast Asia at Oasis Smart SIM
  • Adrian Hernandez, SVP at Simulity

IoT forces the eSIM issue.  One need look no farther than Amazon’s Kindle or GM’s OnStar to immediately recognize the value and inevitability of an embedded-SIM world.  The “Subscriber Identity Module” provides authentication first and foremost, or “a package for a cert,” as it was described in our meeting, but the legacy business models it supports are close to 30 years old: at issue here is control and management of the subscribers.

Operators cannot be too terribly excited about revamping their subscription and provisioning management model, especially when consumers are not crying out for them to do so today–consumers who would need to see practical benefits today for themselves in order to change providers as a result.

The debate over who truly is pro-eSIM (and why) and who is against it, paying lip service to technology that may loosen their grip on the consumer, is too large a discussion for a single Telecom Council RoundTable, but we did get glimpses of the strengths of various arguments and conviction buttressing each.

Expect to see much more on this topic, from us and in the news–maybe at TC3 Summit in September?.

Thank you to our hosts, KPMG, for having our group in and thank you to our Moderator and panelists for such a thought-provoking meeting.

Agenda, Attendee List and Presentations are available to members in the PRESENTATION LIBRARY plus a VIDEO RECAP from the demo companies