I fear this won't even required SIM cards. I'm worried that Apple's Find My and Amazon's Sidewalk networks are the precursors of this: They're effectively company controlled p2p networks that lets the company use their customers' internet access points like a commodity. If one customer refuses to give a device access to the internet, they could use that network to route it through the access point of another customer.

Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.

The customer that "owned" the router wasn't charged for that traffic and the hotspot was isolated from the LAN (or at least the ISP promised that), but it still felt intrusive to just repurpose a device sitting in my living room as "public" infrastructure.

(The ISP initially wanted to do this on an "opt-out" basis, which caused a public uproar thankfully. I think eventually they switched to opt-in and then scrapped the idea entirely.)

What a horrid thought…

You might be interested to read about the findings by Ruter, the publicly owned transport company for Oslo. They discovered their Chinese Yutong electric buses contained SIM cards, likely to allow the buses to receive OTA updates, but consequentially means they could be modified at any moment remotely. Thankfully they use physical SIMs, so some security hardening is possible.

Of course, with eSIMs becoming more widespread, it’s not inconceivable you could have a SoC containing a 5G modem with no real way to disable or remove it without destroying the device itself.

[1] https://ruter.no/en/ruter-with-extensive-security-testing-of...

Real 5G can’t penetrate walls so I doubt it. AT&T 5G is really 4G so that could be added to tv’s easily.

I hope this happens, because with the security track record of these companies it would mean free Internet. These would quickly become web torrent video portals.

I keep being surprised if why that is not a thing yet. Amazon launched whispernet with ads on the discounted Kindle years ago and I was totally predicting more companies jump on that.

Chuck McGill was a visionary?

Add a camera and microphone, and you have yourself a utopia that can control masses.

And it will require an uncovered camera and microphone, or it won't display an image. Sony TVs already come with "optional image optimization" cameras.