Innovations and Disruptions: Telia Company launches eSIM in Finland

Telia Company has enabled the eSIM solution in Finland and will offer the just-released new Samsung Galaxy Watch with an embedded SIM card when it goes on sale in September.

The highly anticipated new Samsung smart watch, the Samsung Galaxy Watch, was unveiled on August 9 at an event in New York. It is the first smart device in Telia Finland’s network that has an eSIM feature and connects to the network without a traditional physical SIM card.

Embedded SIM, eSIM, makes life easier for the user: a subscription can be purchased without needing to get a physical SIM card. As eSIM-fitted devices don’t need the proximity of a smart phone to operate, you can leave your smart phone behind and for example go jogging with the new watch and still make calls, reply to messages, receive notifications, and more.

”Services go digital, and similarly the future of the SIM card is digital. We want to be in the front line and introduce more smooth service to our customers now that eSIM devices are getting more and more common. Managing your subscriptions will be easier with eSIM, when an increasing number of smart devices around us need an internet connection,” says Jussi Vuorinen, head of device business at Telia Finland.

The embedded SIM has many advantages. The device can be designed without a SIM card slot, which makes it easier to design especially small devices. Understandably, smart watches have been the first device category to utilize eSIM, and it is important for the growth of IoT.. eSIM will also help to diminish the environmental effects of manufacturing, packaging and distributing plastic SIM cards as the technology is gradually implemented also in tablets and smart phones.

Telia was the first operator in the Nordics and Baltics to introduce eSIM support in Norway and Estonia in 2016. Telia’s eSIM platform is GSMA standard compliant, which means other eSIM devices coming to the market can also be connected to Telia’s network.

Samsung Galaxy Watch pre-sales will start in Telia Finlands’s sales channels on September 14.