My wife has recently switched from a Windows Phone to an Android one. Since she is still using the same cellular network and account, we just swapped the SIM card from one handset to another and it worked fine.
Fast forward a few weeks, and we’ve headed to the North East (UK) for the weekend, where both of our families live. Yesterday, we were at my parents’ place, and today we’re at her mother’s.
Here’s the thing. Both my folks and her mother have WiFi. My wife’s new phone has never been connected to either network before and has never had the password entered for either network - but in both cases connected seamlessly to the local WiFi networks.
We can rule out mobile data use, since Mrs Snowman has run out of data for the month and therefore can’t connect to the Internet over 3G or 4G. And yet, Internet access was plentiful. At first I thought she’d connected to some local free provider, but on checking the settings on the phone, she is definitely connected - right now - to her Mum’s WiFi, and she’s never put the password in (and I know for a fact that the network is password protected).
The only explanation I can think of is that the WiFi credentials are stored on the SIM card, and therefore the new phone automatically has the password for the WiFi, because we swapped the SIM cards over. Does that seem reasonable? If not, I’ve no idea how the new phone has magically connected to two WiFi networks it hasn’t been told about yet.
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On the several gigabytes of storage which all smartphones have?
The main job of the SIM card (which from memory stands for Subscriber Identity Module) is to identify the user to the cellular network (in this case, O2) so that the network knows that this particular handset has a certain phone number. SIM cards do have some storage for phone numbers - in the days before we saved stuff to the cloud, you could store your contacts on either the SIM or in the phone’s memory, which made it easier to swap phones, but I’ve never heard of them being used to store anything which isn’t related to the mobile network.
Who is your carrier? It is by any odd chance the same as the ISP that is providing the service your respective parent’s?
There is some deep stuff in the 3GPP specifications and capabilities that allows for access to WLAN (ie WiFi) networks to provide for augmented useful access to things. It has been in the spec for a while now, but I have no idea how much it is actually used.
Basically your phone can access WiFI networks and the data be used automatically as an augmented channel along with the phone’s main functions. Your phone carrier would need to be involved here (for instance it is possible for the carrier to organise everything to allow access to paid networks, and aggregate billing.) The upshot here is that it is possible for your carrier to maintain the access credentials to the WiFi networks, and for them to be provided back to the phone when it sees the previously used WiFi. If those WiFi networks turned out to to connect to the same carrier’s IP networking they might be all the more enthusiastic about making use of them.
I have no idea if this is what is happening, but it appears that the capability is already welded into the protocols.
Are you and your wife BT customers (like for your broadband at home), and are your parents and your wife’s mother? If so, the phone may just have locked onto the BT-Fon network shared by the parents routers.
Also, I’m on my fourth iPhone from AT&T and, unlike Android, nowhere in iOS is there a setting or option to store any user data on the SIM card. Given the OP I guess it can store some things on its own though…
My parents and my wife’s mum both are, and that was my first thought. But there are two reasons why I don’t think that’s what happening.
Firstly, my wife ISN’T a BT customer and so doesn’t have the right to use the BT Openzone network (or BT Fon - I’m not sure what the difference is). As such, although phones will sometimes connect to the BT Openzone service, you can’t get further than the landing page, whereas she has had normal access over the weekend. Secondly, although BT Fon is provided by the consumer routers, it presents as a separate SSID (ie network name). I didn’t think to check at my parents’ place, but here at her mum’s the phone is definitely connected to the private SSID, not the public BT one.
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Intriguing question I’ve never heard of a SIM Card storing anything beyond contacts and a low amount of SMS messages in the past (in addition to the really important stuff of course).Could it be your wife has used some of Googles apps on the old phone, and this has somehow synched data with google even though it was a Windows phone?
Sounds like the "wi-fi sense’ functionality. Are your parents running Windows 10? It used to be the default, but there was some kerfuffle about it, so I’m not sure if they changed it away from being on by default.
ETA
Ok. This article says the functionality has been pulled. Sure sounds like what you were experiencing though.
I’ve never heard of a SIM Card storing anything beyond contacts and a low amount of SMS messages in the past (in addition to the really important stuff of course).Could it be your wife has used some of Googles apps on the old phone, and this has somehow synched data with google even though it was a Windows phone?