Business opportunities

Wireless carriers are constantly updating their partnerships for roaming agreements in order to optimize roaming costs and revenues. The USIM combined with an OTA remote management platform means real-time updates with no headache, no re-issuing of the cards and no need to involve the end-user. A real-time, handset independent solution to roaming - What could be better? With LTE, the roaming is enhanced to include various network technologies, including CDMA 1X and EVDO, as well as WLAN systems.

Around the world, the USIM secures transactions within secure international remittance, mobile payment, and mobile banking. As a basis for trusted service infrastructures, the USIM helps operators generatenew revenues with the generation and validation of digital signatures in compliance with global digital signature laws. The latest implementations rely on wireless PKI signing engines in the USIM to secure mobile but also online transactions for banking, investments, corporate, and government applications.

Wireless PKI transactions

With Near Field Communications, these transactions will also include proximity transactions. The world over, many countries are looking to deploy contactless solutions, convinced by the business case of seamless, fast and secure transactions. For the mobile world this comes in two guises: transport and retail.

In transportation, contactless infrastructures are already deployed in almost every major city. It is a natural move to offer this functionality over the mobile phone.

For retail, the use of contactless cards is growing rapidly. We saw a tremendous success of contactless payment in the US: more than 10 million users one year after the launch of the service, being comfortable with the use of a mobile phone to pay for transport and small transactions.

For this complicated system to work, wireless carriers, retailers, transport providers and banks have to work together. What is required is a central organization that works as a trusted service manager, organizing and housing each application independently and securely. The UICC acts as the ideal storage and management point for each member of the NFC value chain.

These are just some examples of areas where the UICC can add value. The list is not exhaustive and depends on each carrier’s marketing strategy. One thing is sure: wherever there is a UICC, there is greater flexibility, security, portability and opportunity.

Within LTE all-IP networks, these applications will be enhanced and others will appear. The UICC is now fully integrated with IP layers and can even benefit from an IP stack. This brings a whole new range of use cases to which the UICC can bring added value:

Identity management with secure devices: Since the earliest days of the GSM standard, the UICC has been an omnipresent part of the mobile phone. This made it a key element in creating what has become the biggest identity management infrastructure to date, based on its primary focus on user authentication. With the addition of IP connectivity, the value of the UICC card now can be directly brought to internet applications, for example, in performing strong back-end user authentication with popular identity management protocols such as OpenID. In this way, carriers can position themselves as Identity providers, protecting users against identity fraud– a major point in the battle for customer retention.

Secure Voice over IP: The UICC can be used to secure VoIP communications by securing the network or IMS access. The VoIP communication then benefits from this secure link.
Already for specific secure implementation, the UICC is used to secure VoIP communications end to end, with a close integration to soft phones.