Comment 6 for bug 1245860

After more testing, it seems that this issue affects maguro Galaxy Nexus, but not mako Nexus 4. In the attached log (comment #5), it can be seen that all SIM_IO requests are replied with a RADIO_NOT_AVAILABLE error, until telepathy-ofono sends a RIL_REQUEST_RADIO_POWER. This behaviour is not observed in N4.

It seems reasonable that you can read the SIM even when radio is not powered, so I would say that this is a buggy RIL implementation in maguro. Fixing this would require to change telepathy to use the "Powered" property for starting the modem instead of the "Online" property, and do some changes in our rilmodem implementation.