eUICC development mobile operators guilty of dragging their feet

Embedded universal integrated circuit cards (eUICCs) are gaining a lot of attention because of the flexibility and control they offer but, amidst the hype, there is a degree of overpromising going on about the technology’s capability today. In addition, there are distinct factors which are slowing development, for instance, the idea that eUICC enables devices to swap networks on the fly according to the best capacity available is not yet reality. So what’s standing in the way?

Conformity to standards is key to the wider adoption of eUICC according to some in the IoT industry. Emmanuel Routier, the vice president of verticals for IoT and analytics at Orange Business Services, says that as things stand, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) wanting to benefit from changing eUICC profiles can only do so at the beginning, or end of the contract – two use cases supported by Orange in IoT and that were tested intensively with other mobile network operators (MNOs) from the Global M2M Association. So at present, for a car manufacturer with eUICCs in its cars, using the standard implemented by Orange means they can only change profiles at the car delivery stage, or at the end of the contract.

The problem is compounded by the fact that MNOs are reluctant to make their subscription profile widely available. This is particularly important because the OEM manufacturers are increasingly being seen as a major driving force behind IoT adoption. In a recent white paper, Robin Duke-Woolley, an analyst and the chief executive of Beecham Research, wrote: “The big volumes of connected devices in the future will increasingly come from OEM-based applications. It is also increasingly the case that products originally designed for after-market applications are being adapted by their manufacturers to have integrated connectivity. It is this OEM-based category of applications that will be the real growth driver for IoT and it is therefore this category that the eUICC and eSIM solutions have primarily been designed for.”