SV: SV: SV: [governance] ISO standards

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 10:51:32PM +0100, Roland Perry (roland at internetpolicyagency.com) wrote:

> Oddly enough, the original plan was to have a GSM card that was the same  
> size as a credit card,

I still remember those. If memory serves, current small SIMs became
prevalent around mid-90s.

> and which you inserted in any phone.
> The billing would be to the card, not the phone.

That's how it still works for the most part around here (in Finland).
Operator-locked phones are rare.

> Then business models changed so that hardware became locked to the
> SIM, and the lack of need (by then) to regularly swap SIMMs meant
> they could be made much smaller.

I doubt that was the reason. Rather smaller SIMs simply allowed
phones to be made smaller.

That business model change has not been quite universal yet, and I'm
pretty sure it wasn't common in any GSM market in mid-90s when the
smaller SIM format was introduced (certainly not here).
Add the fact given that the biggest player in GSM market, Nokia, is
still fighting against that business model, they'd hardly wanted to
make SIM-changing any harder.

As I said, in Finland most phones are still sold without SIMs, and
vice versa, and since you can even keep your phone number when
changing operators, competition between phone operators is fierce and
call prices cheap. And yes, that means people change SIMs a lot and
their small size has not become a problem.

But, back to the topic: I certainly thin that all kinds of mechanical
interfaces should be standardized in such a way that the orientation
of any connection should be as obvious as possible, even when you
can't see what you're doing (whether due to blindness or darkness).

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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