A report by research firm Frost and Sullivan showed that the world subscriber identification module smart card market made R15.27- billion in 2006. <\/p>\n
It is projected that the market will make R33.8-billion in 2012.<\/p>\n
Lindsey McDonald, F&S analyst, said: “The issue of continuously falling prices has been compounded by the influx of low-cost products from China.<\/p>\n
“Although companies [cellphone operators] are turning to Near Field Communication and Mega SIM cards, they are still apprehensive about the high costs of migration.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.” <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n