UK carrier pushes eSIM at Glastonbury Festival iPhones (and Android)

The push toward eSim is intensifying and you can already see the extent to which the UK is a target market for the card-free phone provisioning tech. One day every iPhone sold most everywhere will be eSIM-only – it’s just a matter of time.

Why do I think this?

Because of what’s happening at Glastonbury Festival this year.

Now, for reasons I can’t bring myself to even imagine, the Glastonbury Festival organizer’s once again failed to provide me with a guest pass for the event this year, it has been some time since they did.

Anyone would think that tech journalists have become uncool, or something. But there it is, there will be no struggling to get to the front of the stage at the most densely populated place in Western Europe for me.

But one thing that is happening this year at Glastonbury comes from Vodafone, which is offering festival-goers free eSIM access for the weekend, as noted by CCS Insights.

Free eSIM access to Glastonbury 

The carrier is the official network for this year’s Glastonbury Festival, and is offering show goers 500 minutes of calls, 500 texts and 50GB of data in an eSIM deal that lasts for 7-days.

It’s a limited offer, and is being made available via the official Glastonbury Festival app. It’s a sweet deal for anyone with an iPhone XS/XR or later as it means you’ll be able to send those mashed up fireside videos to friends and family even if your primary connection is patchy or you run out of bandwidth.

Vodafone is even renting battery packs out to people onsite – but has also geofenced the connection so if you are not on site the eSIM connection won’t work.

Why does this matter?

What’s really important here is that this is the biggest eSIM promotion to take place so far in the UK, and the fact it’s aimed at Glastonbury-goers – arguably among the most switched-on subsections of the UK population – means it’s a serious marketing push as well.

People are going to try the deal, will become accustomed to eSIM, and it likely marks another big step toward the provision of eSIM only smartphones in the UK.

Apple, for example, already only offers eSIM iPhones in the US, and there are many reasons it may want to extend this, not least it’s evident interest in widening the services it makes available via satellite, but also to help make its devices even more resilient and long-lasting.

Expect more of this, “Vodafone has already said it will run a similar promotion at other UK events this summer including Wimbledon, Boardmasters Festival and Kendal Calling,” wrote CCS.

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