The Unlocking of the Smartphone Is Nigh: A Chat With G&D
By Tiernan Ray, March 3, 2017
AT&T ( T), and its ilk, must be prepared for a time in the not-too-distant future that could cause serious disruption to their fiefdoms.
On Wednesday afternoon at the Mobile World Congress, I met with Andreas Morawietz and Volker Gerstenberger of Giesecke & Devrient, a privately owned German firm that’s over 100 years old and that dominates SIMs for mobiles, along with Gemalto. G&D is taking a big role in developing what’s known as “eSIM,” or the embedded SIM, something that is showing up in tablets and smartwatches first, and will have a big role to play in smartphones in the very near future.
Using an eSIM, your device comes with a programmable card inside it already, increasingly one that is soldered to the motherboard of the thing. That device can be programmed “over the air” by different wireless operators. It’s a way to make every single gadget programmable so that it can be provisioned with a number of options.
The Apple ( AAPL) “iPad Pro,” the 9.7-inch model that came out last spring, was the first model that had Apple’s programmable “Apple SIM” soldered to the motherboard, which meant by default, ever Pro was ready to be programmed with a choice of multiple cellular providers. G&D is the supplier to Apple for that eSIM technology.\
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