Author: Martin

Embedded-SIM Intro – Part 8 – Consumer vs. M2M

I’m pretty much done with my introduction series on eSIM Remote Service Provisioing now but there is one important topic still missing that should be mentioned shortly: Downloading virtual SIM cards into an eSIM is not only interesting for consumer devices such as smartphones, tablets, watches, etc. but equally, if not even more, to embedded devices in cars and industrial applications where the device does not directly interact with a user. While the same principles are used for downloading virtual SIMs to such devices, the way this is done is slightly different from what I discussed so far for consumer devices.

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A Telescope View on How OneM2M Works – Part 1

The Internet of Things and Machine to Machine (M2M) communication are not only buzz words in the computing industry today but also in the telecoms sector. In telecoms there is a framework referred to as OneM2M that I’ve come across several times before. However 99% of what I found on the Internet did not bring me any closer to understanding the principles of the framework and how it ties in with cellular networks and NB-IoT. After digging a bit deeper I finally found some resources that helped me to understand what OneM2M actually does and how.

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Wifi QBSS Load Element Shows Number of Connected Devices

Out of curiosity I tend to make a Wifi and cellular network scan when I am at places where I think I might find interesting configurations. When I was recently at a location that deployed Cisco Aironet Wifi Access points I was surprised to find an information element in the beacon frames that contained information about the number of clients connected and the system load (amount of time the access point found the channel busy).

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Embedded-SIM Intro – Part 7 – Interoperability

It is obviously a must that any SIM card works in any cellular mobile device. By and large that works pretty smooth today. There is rigorous testing in place and I only know a few cases where SIM cards and devices did not harmonize and software updates were required to fix the issue. In the eSIM world where the user can’t remove the SIM card anymore but downloads a virtual SIM (a Profile) to a mobile device, interoperability is just as important. So how is this done in practice?

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An Arduino Board with Sigfox + 2 Years Connectivity for 50 Euros

When the Raspberry Pi came out it was a game changer as for the first time a cheap and easy to use Linux based board with lots of connectivity became available to the masses. Last week I read about a new Arduino board with a Sigfox chip that could be another game changer.

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Embedded-SIM Intro – Part 4 – eUICC Provisioning Security

After introducing the eSIM (eUICC) Remote Service Provisioning (RSP) concepts in the previous 3 posts of this series it’s now time to have a look at the security implementation. Security is obviously of paramount importance in the process as the virtual SIM that is downloaded contains the identity (IMSI) of the user and the secret key used for authentication and generation of encryption material. If these two pieces were ever stolen in the RSP service chain it would be the greatest possible disaster for mobile network operators.

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