An Open USSD Enabler to Simplify Access to Mobile Services in Emerging Countries

This paper deals with the study of the role of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) as a means to create low cost value added services for emerging countries. Most mobile telecommunication providers worldwide are tied up to third party USSD solution providers. The latter keep their infrastructure closed, which means that the development of services to be offered over USSD comes at a cost. We target this close infrastructure solution, and provide an open source web enabler in the form of an Application Programming interface (API), that can be used to deliver low cost services to mobile end users in emerging countries. The implementation of our solution, in the form of a prototype, has been successfully tested on the Orange (France Telecom) network.