Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (PTC), the Era network’s Polish operator, is crediting the fact that it has one of the highest usage rates for data content in Central Europeon to its use of a SIM based service menu system from SmartTrust.
Since installing the platform in 2002, PTC has attracted nearly three million users to its portfolio of services, which include mobile banking, horoscopes, jokes, news and weather.
Using SmartTrusts’ SmartaLaCarte system, these can be accessed irrespective of underlying handset or network technology, removing the dependency on WAP / GPRS enabled handsets to generate revenue from value-added data.
SmartaLaCarte allows mobile users to browse available content ‘offline’ by scrolling though service menus held on the SIM.
These menus can be built and managed remotely by the operator, to reflect newly available content, or to provide personalised services according to subscriber type (PTC’s customers are also able to personalise their content menus using a web-based portal on PTC’s website).
When users make a selection, content is pulled from the operator’s server and delivered to the handset.
SmartTrust and PTC have been working together since 2002 to build a scaleable over-the-air delivery platform to build and manage SIM Application Toolkit service menus on customers’ SIMs.
Data is sent to the user over the SM (short message) channel where it is managed by the SmartTrust WIB — a SIM interpreter and interface between the SIM card, applications and operator commands — held on the SIM card. To date, around 250 million SIM cards worldwide contain the SmartTrust WIB.
“The increasing diversity of mobile technologies makes it a challenge for many operators to deploy data services that are accessible across all device and SIM types,” James King, regional sales director, EMEA at SmartTrust, said.
“SmartaLaCarte cuts through this complexity, providing a common infrastructure for the delivery and management of revenue generating data services.
“Not only does the platform drastically reduce time to market for new services, but operators who use menu-driven services in this way report a three to ten fold increase in usage of existing data services.”
The relatively low take-up of data services is often ascribed to customer confusion over the correct configuration of WAP and GPRS settings.