Comprehensive technical knowledge base covering 12 GSMA eSIM specifications. 84+ articles on Remote SIM Provisioning — SGP.02, SGP.22, SGP.32, SGP.41, SGP.29, SGP.23, SGP.25, SGP.26 and more.
Imagine… you have a regular smartphone and a tiny weather sensor sitting on a mountain top. Your phone is always on, always connected to the internet, and you can tap its screen whenever you want. The weather sensor? It’s sealed in a plastic box, has no screen, no keyboard, and only wakes up once a day to send a quick message. They’re totally different: so they need totally different eSIMs!
Phones are easy. They have:
Little IoT robots have none of that:
So engineers had to build a brand new system from scratch. They called it SGP.31 and SGP.32.
Here’s what they invented to solve the robot problem:
Instead of a person tapping a screen, there’s a remote control centre: called the eIM (eSIM IoT Remote Manager) : that sends commands across the internet. One person can manage thousands of devices from a single dashboard.
Each device gets a little helper called the IPA (IoT Profile Assistant). It’s like a translator: it takes commands from the remote control centre and passes them to the eSIM chip inside the device. The IPA doesn’t make decisions: it just delivers messages.
What if a profile switch goes wrong and the robot loses connection? The eSIM chip has a safety net: a fallback profile it can automatically switch to, like a spare parachute. No human needed!
If a profile download breaks halfway through, the chip can roll back to its previous state: like pressing “undo” before anything bad happened.
| Your Phone | IoT Robots |
|---|---|
| You tap “Enable” | Remote control centre sends a signed command |
| QR code scan | Secret code pushed from the cloud |
| Profile has a nickname | No nicknames: robots don’t need names! |
| Always connected | May sleep for weeks |
Everything is remote, automatic, and built for fleets of thousands.
Some IoT devices are designed to run for 10+ years on a single battery: so the eSIM system has to be careful not to wear out the chip’s memory with too many writes!