TeliaSonera Gets SIMs

BARCELONA -- TeliaSonera, the leading telecommunications operator in the Nordic and Baltic states, has commissioned Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), the world's second largest manufacturer of smart cards, to provide it with SIM cards featuring a storage capacity of over one gigabyte(GB) for preliminary trials. The 1 GB SIM card from G&D, dubbed GalaxSIM, runs on a corresponding chip platform from Samsung. The trial will be conducted on a P3600 personal digital assistant (PDA) from HTC.

The GalaxSIM card uses the MMC interface of the P3600 PDA from HTC for speedy communication between card and phone. Although the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) agreed on USB as the standard for a high-speed protocol in November 2006, there are presently still no USB-enabled cell phones available on the market. For that reason, TeliaSonera opted to go with the MMC interface, which is ready for use now, for testing and transition purposes. For later migration to USB standards, G&D already offers USB-enabled GalaxSIM cards.

Telia Company