ETSI Chooses Apple Design for New Nano-SIM Standard?

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has reportedly chosen Apple's design as the new nano-SIM standard, reports PCWorld.

The institute publicly announced the selection of the new form factor giving its dimensions but not specifically revealing whose design it was. Since both Apple's proposed design and the Motorola/RIM revised design based on Apple's have the same dimensions, it's difficult to determine which was selected.

PCWorld claims that Apple's original design was selected.


Apple's specification beat a competing proposal from Nokia, Research In Motion and Google-owned Motorola Mobility... The proposer of the winning specification was identified by card maker Giesecke & Devrient, which had a representative on the committee.

Below you can find ETSI's announcement of the new standard.

--
At its 55th meeting held on 31 May and 1 June 2012 in Osaka, Japan, ETSI's Smart Card Platform Technical Committee agreed a new form factor for the UICC, popularly known as the SIM card.

Today's SIM card designs take up a significant amount of space inside a mobile device. This space is more and more valuable in today's handsets which deliver an ever increasing number of features.


The fourth form factor (4FF) card will be 40% smaller than the current smallest SIM card design, at 12.3mm wide by 8.8mm high, and 0.67mm thick. It can be packaged and distributed in a way that is backwards compatible with existing SIM card designs. The new design will offer the same functionality as all current SIM cards.

The SIM is the most successful smart card application ever. A SIM card is used to securely associate a mobile device with a customer account, preventing fraud and ensuring that calls are correctly routed to customers. It is an essential security feature of mobile networks, and is integrated into every GSM, UMTS and LTE device. Over 25 billion SIM card and derivatives have been produced so far, and the industry continues to issue over 4.5 billion SIM cards each year.

The new form factor was adopted by industry with the involvement of major mobile network operators, smart card suppliers and mobile device manufacturers. The new design will be published in due course in ETSI's TS 102 221 specification, freely available like all ETSI standards from the ETSI website.
--

Read More