Why has the number of active SIM cards on Earth exceeded the number of people on Earth?
According to analytics company GSMA Intellingence, the number of active SIM cards on Earth has exceeded 7.2 billion and continues to grow five times faster than the number of people on Earth. That is, in about ten years the number of SIM cards will be twice the number of their possible owners. According to the same company, only every second inhabitant of the earth has a SIM card connected to the network.
What is the reason for the increase in the number of SIM cards? What makes us have multiple SIM cards? How many SIM cards do we need to satisfy all our needs? We will consider all these questions in our article. Let's start by looking at which devices use SIM cards and what tasks these devices perform.
The simplest device is a mobile phone (not yet a smartphone). A mobile phone contains one or two active SIM cards, the main task of which is to identify the phone so that the cellular company can provide it with communication services. One SIM card, as a rule, has one telephone number and a small amount of memory containing a list of the subscriber’s contacts (in the latest models of SIM cards they refused to store the subscriber’s contact sheet) and information about the service package for this telephone number. Often, in order to save money, subscribers use the services of different cellular operators, that is, they use in parallel either two or more cell phones, or phones with two SIM cards.
This situation is largely artificial. If you know the principle of operation of a SIM card, it becomes clear that you can record several phone numbers on one SIM card. Their number does not affect the efficiency of the phone, nor the memory capacity of the SIM card, which does not contain the subscriber’s information in full, but only has an identifier code. In principle, it is possible to record a SIM card containing the numbers of different mobile operators, but this is not commercially viable.
(c) https://card-online.ru/articles
According to analytics company GSMA Intellingence, the number of active SIM cards on Earth has exceeded 7.2 billion and continues to grow five times faster than the number of people on Earth. That is, in about ten years the number of SIM cards will be twice the number of their possible owners. According to the same company, only every second inhabitant of the earth has a SIM card connected to the network.
What is the reason for the increase in the number of SIM cards? What makes us have multiple SIM cards? How many SIM cards do we need to satisfy all our needs? We will consider all these questions in our article. Let's start by looking at which devices use SIM cards and what tasks these devices perform.
The simplest device is a mobile phone (not yet a smartphone). A mobile phone contains one or two active SIM cards, the main task of which is to identify the phone so that the cellular company can provide it with communication services. One SIM card, as a rule, has one telephone number and a small amount of memory containing a list of the subscriber’s contacts (in the latest models of SIM cards they refused to store the subscriber’s contact sheet) and information about the service package for this telephone number. Often, in order to save money, subscribers use the services of different cellular operators, that is, they use in parallel either two or more cell phones, or phones with two SIM cards.
This situation is largely artificial. If you know the principle of operation of a SIM card, it becomes clear that you can record several phone numbers on one SIM card. Their number does not affect the efficiency of the phone, nor the memory capacity of the SIM card, which does not contain the subscriber’s information in full, but only has an identifier code. In principle, it is possible to record a SIM card containing the numbers of different mobile operators, but this is not commercially viable.
The first reason for the total increase in the number of SIM cards is the reluctance to make friends between cellular operators.
A smartphone, unlike a simple telephone, may have an additional way to interact with the global network. The mechanism of its operation is called Single Wire Protocol (SWP) - a standard for a physical data bus and exchange protocol for connecting a SIM card and an NFC interface chip. Its appearance is due to the reluctance of companies providing their services to smartphone users with contactless payment functions to have a cellular operator as an intermediary. The developers of SWP propose to transfer the function of issuing SIM cards to a trusted TSM center, thus, the cellular operator becomes one of many equal users of a SIM card service that actually does not belong to it. Anyone who wants to create their own mobile payment service will negotiate this with a single TSM and not with many mobile operators. And even if cellular operators do not meet this innovation, it can be separately based on a separate NFC SIM card. And, most likely, this will happen.The second reason is the reluctance to make friends between mobile operators and companies providing mobile services.
A mobile tablet, despite its similarities in some functionality with a smartphone, is a device for a slightly different purpose. Visual information here is much more important than auditory information. Calling on a tablet is “not nice.” A tablet SIM card means fast Internet and unlimited traffic. If we add benefits for mobile telephony to these qualities, we get a tariff that is unfavorable for the operator. A tariff plan that provides good Internet and an optimal set of mobile communications amenities cannot, in principle, be cheap. The solution is simple - buy a separate SIM card for the Internet on your tablet.The third reason is the high cost of simple solutions.
It turns out that one average user can simultaneously have from one to five active SIM cards. The prospect of growth in the number of SIM cards is five to one. In the future, there will probably be new devices that actively use the network. Already now, in principle, it is possible to provide remote control via a network to any device, almost anywhere in the world. The number of active cards will increase, expand functions, and appear in new qualities. And the fact that there are already more of them than us only shows that people, despite the need for communication, do not know how to negotiate.(c) https://card-online.ru/articles
