Microsoft is building its own SIM card for Windows

[nivla]

I wish if most surface devices came with the option for 4G/LTE. Heck even a GPS sensor would come in handy when mapping. Not sure why but MS chooses to ignore having these basic features even on their expensive line of Surface products.

That said, does anyone know any universal 3G/4G/LTE dongle? Almost everything I found is made exclusive to a specific carrier. How come cheap tablets come with a universal data capability and yet no usb dongles?

[flipchart]

Honest question, why do you need another separate dongle just for 3G/4G/LTE when you can simply use your phone's hotspot option and use the network there?

[Mandatum]

Check Amazon, Huawei make a lot of these dongles.

[charlotteley]

How can the manufacturers cooperate with the carriers all over the world? Conflict of interest is huge. In a lot of countries, governments own the carriers or the market is oligopoly. Can they make carriers agree with it?

[digi_owl]

roaming agreements? set up a virtual carrier somewhere, and then basically pay other carriers for traffic your customers produce on their networks? Stuff like that has been commonplance in the GSM world since, well, forever.

[dogma1138]

Kindle 3g works pretty much everywhere.

[shmerl]

Why do you need any special cards for such things? Even laptops today can come with LTE modems / SIM readers, and all you need a SIM card from your mobile provider to use it.

[maxsilver]

It's not a special card in that way -- your regular mobile provider SIM still works just as always.

The Microsoft "special" sim card is presumably a standard multi-MVNO sim card with (presumably) some nice app for buying service. Similar to Apple SIM or Google Fi.

It's nice to have for people who and aren't carrying around SIM cards to swap around. (Maybe they don't know what a SIM card is, or maybe they haven't had time to burn 2 hours in a mobile provider shop to get one). They can buy a device, turn it on, and the app walks them through buying data automatically so everything "just works".

[makeithappen]

Isn't this exactly what Apple tried to do with iPads but AT&T put a kibosh on it?

[mazatta]

This is the program you are referring to: https://www.apple.com/ipad/apple-sim/

AT&T will lock your physical SIM if you ever use their service, but with anyone else you can jump from provider to provider on the same device at will.

[nivla]

If I recall correctly, Apple let you chose the one provider you want without requesting a separate sim from each. This instead lets you use multiple providers using a single sim and hops to best one as they becomes available. Its much similar to Google-Fi in practice.

[dang]

Url changed from http://gizmodo.com/microsofts-making-its-own-sim-card-to-pro..., which points to this.

[fredgrott]

would this be a nice way to lock someone into a carrier, nah MS would never ever think of ever doing such a thing?

[NetStrikeForce]

I don't think we need Microsoft to lock us into a carrier, we're happy to do it in exchange for this year's iteration of the iPhone, Galaxy or whatever.