SIM Cards Fundamentals

SIM Cards Fundamentals is the fifth and last course of the Telecom Foundations path and builds on Telecom Fundamentals and above all on GSM Fundamentals, where the SIM was introduced as a subscription on a card. It starts with what a SIM is today: the road from the GSM SIM to the UICC platform with its USIM and ISIM applications, the eUICC and the eSIM, the form factors from removable cards to soldered chips, and what the card does for the subscription during a session. It then follows the smart-card hardware and its electrical interface, the answer to reset, the transmission protocols, the commands and status words that a phone exchanges with the card, and the file system of master file, dedicated files, application dedicated files and the key elementary files. Later modules cover the identities and subscription data on the card, the card's side of authentication with Milenage as an example algorithm set, the SIM Application Toolkit, over-the-air management with secured packets, and the eUICC with remote provisioning for consumer, machine-to-machine and IoT devices. The last module looks at manufacturing and personalisation, the operators and MVNOs that issue cards, and machines, IoT and integrated SIMs. The course ends with an interactive review that follows a new eSIM from QR code to first registration.