Large SIM Phonebook for Globe in Motorola’s C117

Globe in the Philippines is a high profile operator handling 15m subscribers, 95% of whom are Prepaid users served under the "TouchMobile" and “Handyphone” brands. With its large and segmented user base, Globe has seen early the benefit of leveraging SIM toolkit to deploy rapidly new services. Over the past couple of years Globe has been successfully deploying Prepaid Topup and Information-on- Demand based on DSTK, on both 64k and 128k SIM cards.

Fighting against churn of Prepaid users

Most recently, one of the major concerns for Globe was to reduce churn of Prepaid users, while fuelling voice ARPU. Allowing users to store a very large number of contacts in their SIM appeared to be a very rational way to do so, as the users would have at hand a large, portable phonebook that they would not need to re-enter when upgrading or replacing their mobile phone.

As a SIM Card’s phonebook is limited to 254 records by the GSM 11.11 standard, Gemplus has embarked on a STK project to supply Globe’s SIMs with more than 254 records. This is commonly known as the Large Phonebook application. This application uses additional folders in the SIM to store more Phonebook and SMS records.

First of its kind breakthrough partnership

In June 2005 Gemplus developed a solution for Globe where a Motorola C117 handset is able to display multiple Phonebooks and SMS folders concurrently. A total of 500 SIM phonebook entries and 80 SIM inbox messages are handled simultaneously by this phone, providing Caller Line Identification capabilities across all phonebook entries. This partnership between Gemplus and Globe is a first in the Telecom industry. Globe launched this handset during the 2005 Christmas season and has seen strong market uptake.