London, UK. February 4, 2013 – SIMalliance, the global non-profit trade association dedicated to supporting the creation, deployment and management of secure mobile services, has today published a collection of guidelines and recommendations for manufacturers designing handsets, tablets, modems and other devices that utilise a UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card).
The UICC Device Implementation Guidelines document complements existing UICC specifications from European Telecommunications Standards Institute Smart Card Platform (ETSI SCP) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) by highlighting both the fundamental and optional UICC features that device manufacturers will need to support in order to optimise UICC interoperability in future devices. To ensure the guidelines are suitably comprehensive, the document also references relevant specifications from GSMA, GlobalPlatform and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).
“Optimising how a mobile device utilises a UICC is central to the development of a secure, open and interoperable environment for mobile services and will benefit the entire ecosystem,” comments Frédéric Vasnier (pictured), chairman of the SIMalliance Board. “With new technologies like NFC and LTE 4G now making demands on a device’s UICC, achieving device compliance across multiple standards is becoming an increasingly complicated task. By reviewing each of the industry specifications, extracting the relevant features needed for UICC device implementation and providing recommendations for different categories of device, our guidelines aim to assist in the design and manufacture of standards-compliant devices across the industry.”
The guidelines document will benefit product and technical teams working in organisations involved in the manufacture and design of devices or chipsets with telecom network connectivity, together with the teams within mobile network operators (MNO) responsible for defining device requirements.
The UICC Device Implementation Guidelines are available for download at http://www.simalliance.org/en/resources/recommendations/. They are intended to assist technicians with the implementation of UICC features in relation to three distinct categories of device: generic, near field communications (NFC) and long term evolution (LTE) 4G.
