Gemalto Completes Unprecedented OTA Campaign Covering Over 53 Million Mobile Subscribers in China

Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO), the world leader in digital security, today announces the successful completion of over 53 million over-the-air (OTA) updates1 of GSM and CDMA mobile customers representing 6.3 billion short messages across 8 provinces in China. This demonstrates how useful and also how efficient OTA campaigns have become as a fundamental tool for SIM card data administrative management and even complete application download and activation.
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 started out being used for basic SIM data management such as updating mobile operator’s short message center addresses, which are kept in the internal storages of the SIM card. It developed with proactive management of international roaming partnership by operators that rapidly benefited from a lucrative optimization of their internationally-traveling customer base, and from significant additional revenue and profit without having to raise their customer’s tariffs.

With the introduction of the first SIM-based applications, operators swiftly identified the unique opportunity to use Gemalto OTA platforms as a way to properly manage the mobile application deployment and lifecycle. It became for example rapidly apparent that as China subscriber numbers ballooned, there would be a need to effectively and efficiently manage hundreds of millions of SIM cards not only as a user base but also individually to suit the particular needs of each individual subscriber.

Tan Teck Lee, Asia President at Gemalto commented, “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. 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”.

New generation Gemalto OTA platforms further proved their usefulness and flexibility as key technology enabling tools for cutting edge business developments such as the Near Field Communications (NFC) deployments which are presently happening around the world. Gemalto has combined its expertise in telecom’s OTA with its long experience in banking and transportation personalization systems to serve these new needs. Gemalto latest OTA platforms are able to efficiently provide trusted services management to an extremely large consumer base, as evidenced by this massive campaign successfully executed in China.

Gemalto : 11/06/2008