Increasing Mobile Penetration by Lowering User

Entry Barriers and Liberating Mobile Phone

Users from Operator Lock-in
Keru Antony (antonykkiarie@gmail.com), Obura Kirimi (kirimi.achieng@gmail.com),
Mworia Wilfred Mutua (wmworia@gmail.com)

Abstract
A key challenge facing mobile users has been the varying payment plans and
offers given by the different companies. In a bid to gain market share, some of
these companies have created extremely competitive pricing plans for their users.
These pricing plans however, are usually targeted at gaining and locking in
customers, hence while making calls or sending text messages from one mobile
phone to another, where both phones are using the same provider has become
fairly cheap; doing the same across different service providers is still very
expensive.

With n different mobile service providers, how can a user enjoy the different
benefits of whichever mix of service providers he/she wishes to subscribe to on no
more than a single mobile device - protecting mobile service users from lock-in and
giving them the freedom to enjoy the various services as they would wish?
Introduction & Problem Statement
The number of mobile service providers in Kenya (and in many other African
countries) has increased greatly. In Kenya, there are now four mobile service
providers: Safaricom, Zain, Yu and Orange. A key challenge facing mobile users has
been the varying payment plans and offers given by the different companies. In a
bid to gain market share, some of these companies have created extremely
competitive pricing plans for their users. These pricing plans however, are usually
targeted at gaining and locking in customers, hence while making calls or sending
text messages from one mobile phone to another, where both phones are using the
same provider has become fairly cheap; doing the same across different service
providers is still very expensive.

Furthermore, the different mobile service providers have offers that last through
certain times of day and not others, making it more attractive to use one particular
service within say, morning hours and another service at a different time. Adding to
this is the complexity to the mobile phone user of maintaining multiple contact lists;
many users stick to one service provider (despite higher service costs) because all
their important contacts are using the same service provider.

These factors have led to a common problem: most mobile phone users tend to
have multiple SIM cards or one SIM card per service provider. This was a fairly good
solution when there were only two mobile service providers in the country. However,
having two SIM cards for the two mobile service providers (at the time) had an
adverse effect; if you had one phone, it meant that you could only be reached on
one of your two phone numbers at any given time.

People resorted to buying two phones, one for each service provider, in this way;
one could be reached on whichever number at any given time. However, there are a
few problems with this solution: firstly, buying a second phone means an additional
cost (which perhaps the less well off in society could not afford); secondly, one had
to incur the burden of carrying around and maintaining two different phones.
 Later on, advances in mobile devices introduced dual-SIM mobile phones. One
could have two SIM cards in one phone. This solves the problem of maintaining two
different phones. However, in most of these devices, and especially the more
affordable ones, there would be a blocking effect caused by the fact that the phone
could only route phone calls to only one Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card at a
time. But with advances in the technology one phone could switch between the two
SIM cards transparently. (Interestingly, today there are even quad-SIM mobile
devices!)

Now, the last three paragraphs have been written with the assumption that there
were two mobile service providers. Today, as earlier stated, there are four mobile
service providers thus compounding the problem further..and because they all have
competitive pricing plans, it is now common to find consumers with up to four SIM
cards to one phone; or in some cases four SIM cards to multiple phones. This has
become a burden to the user.

It is this very problem that this paper seeks to provide a solution to by describing
some experimental work we are doing. The intent here is to find a lasting solution
such that with n different mobile service providers, a user can enjoy the different
benefits of whichever mix of service providers he/she wishes to subscribe to on no
more than a single mobile device. Hence instead of having a many (service
providers/SIMs) to many mobile devices (referred to hereafter as the ‘m:m’
scenario), we seek to present a solution that will enable a many (service
providers/SIMs) to one mobile device scenario (referred to hereafter as the ‘m:1’
scenario).

This solution aims at protecting mobile service users from consumer lock-in
tactics used by their providers thus enabling them to enjoy as many services as
possible from as many providers as possible and give them the freedom to enjoy
the various services as they would wish.

Justifying the Problem

 It has already been shown that there are already some alternatives that address
the stated problem. So why should we seek another alternative? Is the problem
grave enough to warrant this?

The use of mobile phones has been growing rapidly in recent years, especially in
Africa. For the typical African, the mobile phone may be the only computing device
they have or will probably ever get to use. The mobile phone has become the
computing device of choice for Africa and the developing world. This can be seen
through the tremendous growth of mobile service provider subscriber bases. In
Kenya, Safaricom, the largest mobile service provider in the country has over 12
million subscribers. Recently the mobile services market has become even more
complex with there being four mobile service providers in the country.

The mobile phone has become a powerful tool to fight poverty; with innovative
solutions such as Safaricom’s award winning MPESA utility that has become enabled
the un-banked population to obtain some financial services. Recently, Zain, another
player in the mobile market in Kenya also launched what it calls Zap, a similar
‘mobile money’ application.

The power of the mobile phone to alleviate poverty and bring social change can
also be seen in the recent emergence of the Mobile 4 Change conferences that have
been held in different cities around the world. These conferences seek to find ways
of leveraging the mobile phone to bring about social change.

Prof. Nathan Eagle, a professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT), has been involved in innovating in this area. He has created a service called
txteagle (http://txteagle.com) that enables ordinary people to get paid for carrying
out simple tasks on a mobile phone such as translating texts.

An extensive report on the impact of mobile phones in Africa carried out by

Vodafone [Vodafone 2005] provides some interesting insights. For example,
according to the paper, at the end of 2003 there were 6.1 mobile telephone
subscribers per 100 inhabitants in Africa, much less than in other parts of the world
such as the 55 per 100 in Europe at the time. However, the growth of mobile
telephone has been phenomenal; for example, there was a 1000% increase in
subscribers in Africa in the 5 years to 2003. Furthermore, whereas Europe took 15
years to get to a point where the penetration of mobile phones surpassed that of
traditional land lines, it took Africa only 5 years to do the same.

Figure 1: Growth of Overall Mobile Penetration Source: Vodafone Policy Paper Series,
Number 2, 2005; Africa: The Impact of Mobile Phones

More recent studies show the exponential growth of mobile in Africa and the
developing world is still continuing:
 Figure 2: Africa subscriber growth.

The dynamics of Africa also tip the scales much more. In Europe and the US, the
mobile phone is considered really as a personal device, however, Africa, for
example, the sharing of mobile devices in communities has given even people
without personal handsets access to mobile telephony.

The same paper goes ahead to elaborate on how the mobile phone has had an
impact on economic growth in developing countries, the effect on Foreign Direct
Investment (FDI) as well as social impacts. For example, there have been indications
that there is a strong correlation between mobile penetration and things such as
GDP, GNP and other economic indicators, social-demographic indicators,
urbanization and more.

Figure 3: Mobile subscriptions and GNI per capita (2002) Source: Vodafone Policy Paper
Series, Number 2, 2005; Africa: The Impact of Mobile Phones

In regards to FDI particularly, it appears, by looking at the levels of FDI in

relation to the growth of telecommunications sectors and particularly mobile
telephony in developing countries, that there is a strong correlation:
 Figure 4: Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Inflows per capita 1998-2002 average.Source:
Vodafone Policy Paper Series, Number 2, 2005; Africa: The Impact of Mobile Phones

This is even without mentioning new and innovative business models that have
come up especially in the developing world as a result of mobile telephony.

Looking at this evidence, we can form the hypothesis that developing countries
can make even greater developmental strides by increasing the penetration and
usability of mobile services even further. We hold that this can be done at least in
part by lowering the barrier to entry for mobile service consumers. One such way of
doing this would be to solve the stated problem of service lock in and associated
costs of e.g. cross provider charges.

Our Work: The Virtualized SIM - Multiple ‘SIM’s on

a single Smart Card
An interesting trend in Operating Systems development nowadays is
Virtualization. This trend has found its way to the mobile device. The virtualization
company VMware has worked on a virtualization platform for mobile devices termed
the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform that decouples the applications and data
on a mobile device from the underlying OS platform [VMware MVP]. Other
companies such as HipLogic and VirtualLogix have also been working on bringing
virtualization to the mobile platform. Open Kernel Labs has succeeded in creating
such a platform, the OKL4 microvisor, [OKL4] which has been used to successfully
virtualize Motorala's Evoke, giving the mobile phone the capability to run two
different Operating Systems.

Our work borrows in principle from this concept of virtualization. The

distinguishing factor being that we are seeking to take virtualization even further, to
the smart card platform!

Assumptions
There are two key assumptions made in the solution provided:

1. That that physical SIM card is provided independently of the mobile service
provider: The case today is that each mobile service provider issues their own
physical SIM card (i.e. the actual smart card)

2. That the target mobile device can only accommodate a single physical SIM
card

A key distinction is made of the physical SIM card, which is the small chip (smart
card) that the user inserts into the phone. Because of the nature of how the SIM
card is currently used, each mobile service provider has to issue their own SIM card
and a user cannot enjoy a subscription service to that provider without having a SIM
card issued by that provider, leading to the m:m situation we saw earlier.

The solution presented deviates from this in that there would be only one
physical SIM card that the user would need. This single physical SIM card would host
multiple virtualized SIM cards (note the distinction with the GSM Virtual SIM). Each
virtualized SIM card would represent a single mobile service provider and entitle the
user to that provider’s service. Here’s what the situation proposed would look like:

1. Only one (1) physical SIM card per phone – 1:1 relationship between a
physical SIM card and a phone
 2. One (1) physical SIM card, multiple service providers – 1:M relationship
between a physical SIM card and multiple service providers

Before going into how our solution would work, it is imperative that we first take
a look at the SIM card as it is currently implemented, what services it provides and
what makes it necessary for there to be one SIM card per mobile service provider.
Based on this we can then go ahead to propose the solution.

Is this even possible?

One option we have considered would involve modifying the SIM Operating
System. However, this has significant challenges associated with it. First of all, there
are several GSM standards that would have to be revised to allow for this.
Furthermore, the current implementation of the SIM already has massive market
penetration and it would be quite difficult to introduce a new SIM card, which would
in itself take several years to get the same market penetration.

The second option, which provides much greater chances of success, is to

provide an application level implementation of the proposed idea.

The GSM standard provides specifications for the SIM Card [GSM 11.11] – both in
terms of physical specifications as well as application protocols. The GSM
specification 11.14 provides the specification for the SIM Application Toolkit for SIM
to Mobile Equipment (ME i.e. the mobile device) interface which allows consistent
implementation and function of the SIM and the ME, decoupling device
manufacturers and SIM implementations. Furthermore, the GSM 02.19 provides a
specification for an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows application
programmers to access the functions and data described in the 11.11 and 11.14
specifications. This provides application programmers the ability to program the
SIM, this provision is what makes it possible for the creation of such services as
MPESA. In addition to this, an additional specification the 03.19 standard binds the
API to Java Card, a subset the Java programming language. This means an
application developer can use the Java language to write applications for the SIM
card.

Hence, there is a real possibility of providing an application level solution without

tampering with the GSM SIM specification by following the already laid out interface
and API specifications.

Furthermore, it is interesting that there are already precedents of SIM

applications that make significant changes to the operation of the SIM. A case in
point is the implementation of a web server in the SIM that allows transparent
access into the Internet [WebSIM]. Guthery et al in their description and
implementation of WebSIM do exactly this. They make it possible for a SIM to be
accessible over the Internet, communicating via HTTP 1.0 and being able to receive
HTTP requests across the Internet and the SIM is able to create HTTP responses:

Figure 5: HTTP Requests to a SIM. Source: [WebSIM]

Their work is motivated by previous work [Rees & Honeyman]. Their Webcard is
a TCP/IP stack and web server that runs on a smart card.

Therefore, it is quite possible to use the SIM in ways other than the intended
purpose without breaking GSM standards and specifications, by leveraging the SIM
Application Toolkit interfaces and APIs.

Our current work involves prototyping such a solution with the aim of providing a
means for a single SIM (smart card) to host and switch between multiple service
providers.
Challenges
The main challenges come from the characteristics of the SIM itself. The card is
greatly limiting in terms of the memory available to work with. However, from the
WebSIM implementation it has been shown that it is possible to implement a web
server in under 10K bytes of Java byte code. In fact their implementation as at the
publishing of their paper on WebSIM was 7K. Therefore we believe it is possible to
implement this without impacting heavily on card memory.

Conclusion
This paper has presented a case for the Virtualized SIM - a SIM that can host
multiple service provider details and switch between them transparently on a single
smart card.
References
[Vodafone 2005] Africa: The Impact of Mobile Phones; Vodafone
Paper Series; Number 2 (2005)

[VMware MVP] Vmware Mobile Virtualization platform;

http://www.vmware.com/technology/mobile/

[OKL4] Eliminating Development Drudgery with Mobile Phone

Virtualization;http://www.embedded-computing.com/articles/id/?4086; Steve Subar
(2009)

[GSM 11.11] Digital cellular telecommunications system (Phase 2+);

Specification of the Subscriber Identity Module – Mobile Equipment (SIM – ME)
interface (1995)

[GSM 11.14] 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Specification of the

SIM Application Toolkit for the Subscriber Identity Module - Mobile Equipment (SIM -
ME) interface (Release 1999)

[GSM 02.19] 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification

Group Terminals; Subscriber Identity Module Application Programming Interface (SIM
API); Stage 1 (Release 1999)

[GSM 03.19] 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification

Group Terminals; Subscriber Identity Module Application Programming Interface (SIM
API) for Java Card™; Stage 2 (Release 1999)

[WebSIM] How to Turn a GSM SIM into a Web Server:

Projecting mobile trust to the World Wide Web; Scott Guthery, Roger Kehr, Joachim
Posegga (2000)

[Rees & Honeyman]Webcard: a Java Card web server; Jim Rees, Peter
Honeyman (1999)