Monday, 16 June 2008

Gemalto Completes OTA Campaign in China

Digital security provider Gemalto said last week that it has completed over 53 million over-the-air (OTA) updates of GSM and CDMA mobile customers representing 6.3 billion short messages across 8 provinces in China.

Hailing it as an “unprecedented” effort, Gemalto said this demonstrates how useful and how efficient OTA campaigns have become as a fundamental tool for SIM card data administrative management and even complete application download and activation.

According to Gemalto, remote update of millions of active SIM cards in the field is not only a possibility but in some cases, the only way. Operators are spared managing the masses of subscribers turning up at the point of sale, or the logistics burden of sending replacement cards individually. All updates happen invisibly in the background without disturbing the subscriber; a process that now takes only a matter of weeks to cover targets of tens of millions of subscribers. The background process of updating also means continuity of service and more importantly, additional revenue, which are of course critical factors for operators.

Gemalto OTA platforms are used as a way to manage the mobile application deployment and lifecycle.

“OTA platforms have consistently been an invisible but critical link between subscribers and their services. Moving forward, we now see our OTA platforms as an essential bridge to provide secure connectivity to a wide variety of new cross segment services,” said Tan Teck Lee, Asia President at Gemalto.

“Acting as a conduit, Gemalto platforms channel services from non-telecom service providers, be they banks or transport providers, and makes them mobile. This further expands the convenience and ease of use for users and creates new opportunities for operator and service providers alike.”