May 15, 2020 Request for Promoting Public Opening of Remote SIM Provisioning Function

  The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has today made a request to NTT Docomo, Inc. (headed by Kazuhiro Yoshizawa, President and CEO), KDDI Corporation (headed by Makoto Takahashi, President and Representative Director), and SoftBank Corp. (headed by Ken Miyauchi, President and CEO) for promoting the opening of a remote SIM provisioning function. MIC expects that this will enable mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) to provide compatible eSIM services.

As pointed out in the final report (February 2, 2020) of the study group on the competitive environment of the mobile market, eSIM is expected to spread worldwide. From the perspective of developing a fair competition environment between mobile network operators (MNO) and MVNO and improving user convenience, it is extremely important to enable MVNO to provide compatible eSIM services. Telecommunications carriers that have category II designated telecommunications facilities (hereafter referred to as “category II designated operators”) can provide compatible eSIM services using a remote SIM provisioning function (hereafter referred to as “the RSP function”). In such a case, it is appropriate to enable MVNO to be able to provide the same services with the opening of the RSP function. (RSP function: A function to write information, such as information on mobile station international subscriber directory numbers (MSISDN), remotely to the SIM to gain access to the mobile phone network.)
From the above point of view, in relation to the Guidelines on Application of the Telecommunications Business Act and Radio Act related to MVNO (established in June 2002), MIC has today positioned the RSP function as a function that should be opened to facilitate discussions between category II designated operators and MVNO.
Accordingly, MIC has today requested NTT Docomo, Inc., KDDI Corporation, and SoftBank Corp. to make a concrete report on MVNO’s request and the progress of discussions with MVNO regarding the opening of RSP functions in order to ensure steady progress in the discussions.