According to the official website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, on October 19, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued an official document to give China Mobile and China Telecom the approval of providing eSIM technology application service in the field of Internet of Things and other fields. Early in this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued its approval to allow China Unicom to provide such service. By now, the three major operators in China have been approved to provide eSIM technology application service in the field of Internet of Things.
The concept of eSIM cards means to embed traditional SIM cards on the chip of devices directly instead of inserting the cards into devices as independent removable components. The users no longer have to insert physical SIM cards into their device, able to select service packages of operators more flexibly. For IoT terminals that are very sensitive to power consumption and size, eSIM cards are more indispensable.
At the recent "5G NB-IoT Development Industry Summit", relevant official of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology disclosed the following information: The number of mobile IoT device connections in the country has exceeded 1 billion, among which the number of NB-IoT (Narrowband Internet of Things) connections has exceeded 100 million. Up to now, our country has built over 700,000 IoT-related base stations. By the end of the year, the number of mobile IoT device connections is expected to reach 1.2 billion and the NB-IoT network is expected to achieve universal coverage in major urban areas above country level.