Our Next Handsets Have No SIM Tray and Our Depots Still Swap SIM Cards From a Drawer

Our upcoming mobile devices will lack traditional SIM trays. Instead, the phone's identity resides on an eSIM, a profile downloaded onto an internal chip. A trial involving forty phones at two depots ran for three months, revealing the device functioned well. However, the drawer containing spare SIM cards proved problematic. During this trial, four phones experienced damage, and each instance required manual intervention.

Accessing a new profile from the business portal necessitated authorization, limited to two individuals in our headquarters team, who worked during regular hours. One such individual faced a full morning wait before resolving the issue, while the other three cases resolved by using a borrowed phone from the yard, causing significant inconvenience to customers.

This process raises security concerns, as transferring the number can now be done remotely by anyone with portal access. To counter this, we plan to appoint two supervisors with restricted rights to reissue profiles, monitored through security keys, with every reissue alerting our team. A full rehearsal will be conducted at each depot prior to the introduction of the new handsets.

We anticipate transitioning more physical tasks at depots into digital permissions within the portal. Ultimately, the decision on who controls the access once the drawer of physical SIM cards disappears should be made well in advance, before the first phone malfunctions.