Gemalto successfully 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. 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 no interruption of services.
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 later developed into another revenue source with international roaming partnership by operators that rapidly benefited from a lucrative optimization of their internationally-traveling customer base.
With the introduction of the first SIM-based applications, operators swiftly identified the opportunity to use an OTA platform as a way to properly manage the mobile application deployment and life cycle. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/archive-4.gif)
