A built-in SIM would lock the phone onto a single carrier in a single country, even after your contract runs out, after which you would legally be able to use other carriers' SIM cards, but like this you won't be able to.
But from the description of the article (and the article itself) this is
not a built in SIM card. The better description is that it is a reprogrammable SIM card. It would defacto do what you do now when you swap cards. The only hang up is that this company , Gemalto , would have to do the swapping for you. Probably some app would "contact the mothership" to their servers for an update. Retrieve your "other" SIM ID and subscription info ( or get new one if first time in country) and then reprogram the internal SIM card with new ID and info. When you go back home, it "contacts the mothership" and flips it back.
So instead of carrying 2-4 SIM cards with you everywhere, there would be this cloud service that flipped you to the right SIM ID on demand. The carriers aren't squeezed out necessarily. Just changing the logistics of allocating and distributing SIM ID cards.
I'm not sure the phone companies are going to buy into trusting Gemalto to do this. SIM cards are secure because you cannot reprogram the information. There would have to be some buy-in to the fact that only Gemalto can pull off changing the IDs. You'd also need to pragmatically to either do the flip before you left your old zone or find some WiFI spot to "contact the mothership" on. [ card swapping is easier because can just jump onto carriers network with ID/info on the card. ]
Where the article is wrong is that the carriers are out of the loop. If Gemalto doesn't establish the SIM ID as being valid on the carrier, you are not going to get service. So the carriers would have to either rely on Gemalto does the SIM ID provisioning or there would be some way for the carriers to do remote provision the ID (although that has problems too since would have random devices requesting IDs at each carrier. ).
The only solution would be if ALL carriers in the world agreed to stop using SIM cards and use an alternative software identification system instead. This would take ages to adopt.
No. This would be transparent to the current SIM cards. The deployed infrastructure it would still be a SIM ID. It doesn't matter how the ID gets to the phone, just so long as it is valid and secure.
The only thing that is not transparent is the initially programming and reprogramming of the card.
It is the same system. Just changing how program and distribute the cards.
If the carriers have to buy alot of equipment for this vendor to do provisioning I can see it as a problem. If done as a service that would be less of a problem, if it can get past the security vetting process.
Of course, with the current iPhone, you're locked into using one SIM anyway, so it doesn't really make a difference: you can't change SIM cards even if you can physically take it out.
Right this won't change carrier lock down because they are still in the loop.
