Packaging
Giesecke & Devrients Auto Roaming Simplifies Market Entry for New Mobile Providers
Tuesday 17. February 2009 - Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) will be presenting its new Auto Roaming SIM card application at the GSM World Congress (Hall 8, Stand B65).
It offers considerable advantages to operators of small or new mobile networks who wish to set up a comprehensive roaming service for their customers as rapidly as possible. The solution is based on innovative SIM cards developed by G&D, which can store IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) codes issued by two or more network operators and are equipped with a special JavaTM applet. The users automatically receive all calls under their one single number, wherever they happen to be.
The ability to quickly provide a wide-scale roaming service is very important to the market success of new mobile network operators. After all, many customers want to be able to use their mobile phone when traveling abroad, not only in their home country. In the past, this meant that the service provider had to negotiate a large number of roaming agreements with other network operators – a time-consuming process that severely reduced the new providers chances of penetrating the market in the introductory phase.
The new Auto Roaming application offered by Giesecke & Devrient, which is compatible with all types of JavaTM SIM card, will make it much easier for network operators to offer their customers a full roaming service without losing time. They only need to sign an agreement with a single partner organization to obtain the right to utilize their roaming service. As a rule, this will be one of the major mobile operators that has its own global network or existing roaming agreements with other network operators throughout the world.
Customers who wish to receive calls while traveling abroad make use of G&D SIM cards that support the Auto Roaming application and the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) numbers of at least two network operators. The main IMSI is used to identify the subscriber when making calls from their home providers network. In other countries, the mobile phone automatically reports its location using the IMSI of a partner operator and is thus able to utilize that operators roaming functions. Callers use one and the same number to contact the called subscriber on their mobile phone.
G&D has implemented the Auto Roaming application as a Java applet on the SIM card. Its use is thus independent of the phone in which it is installed. The user does not need to switch between different IMSI numbers – this is done automatically. If necessary, the Java applet can be reconfigured over the air (OTA), i.e. through the cellphone network.