Switch to new SIM cards likely to hit a snag
A report by research firm Frost and Sullivan showed that the world subscriber identification module smart card market made R15.27- billion in 2006.
It is projected that the market will make R33.8-billion in 2012.
Lindsey McDonald, F&S analyst, said: “The issue of continuously falling prices has been compounded by the influx of low-cost products from China.
“Although companies [cellphone operators] are turning to Near Field Communication and Mega SIM cards, they are still apprehensive about the high costs of migration.”
The SIM cards will allow cellphones to store up to 1 gigabyte of information, a million times more than the current 32-kilobyte SIM cards, which have limited storage capacity.
Tshepo Tsele, Paperless Consulting director, said: “I think the market here would really go for this technology, but the current infrastructure is limited in capacity.
“Cell C still doesn’t support 3G technology and Vodacom’s infrastructure is 14 years old. Some of them are laying out fibre-optic cables to improve capacity, but that needs to be accelerated.”
Telecommunications market Analyst, Anoop Ubhey, said: “With the increasing number of multimedia applications, mobile network operators will now seek SIM-based multimedia solutions to better serve their customers and, for this integration, the SIM requires greater memory.”
The first SIM cards to enter the market had a capacity of up to 16KB with functionality limited to phone calls and text messaging. Current technology allows for Multimedia Messaging Service and GPRS global positioning.
The new SIM cards will have features such as Internet connectivity, flash memory, address book, calendar back-up, messaging, teleconferencing, file transfers, chat services and gaming.
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