USSD – Dead or alive
As a mature technology USSD has its obvious advantages such as support by all mobile phones. This way a USSD based dialogues are available for everybody who has a mobile phone. But the question is whether the usage of USSD for dialogue applications will decrease because of the emergence of smart phones. We think not, or at least it will take a long time.
One reason is that the penetration of smart phones is quite low even in the developed parts of the World and the owners of smart phones do not always know how to operate it. In the developing parts of the world the smart phone penetration is still very low.
At the same time USSD based dialogue applications can produce a user experience comparable with a web based dialogue at smart phones. Also smart phone based applications that run USSD commands are emerging.. This will enable a USSD based service to be used by both smart phones and ordinary phones.
Our USSD Center has smooth interfaces to the IP world such as XML, SOAP, HTML, SMPP and APIs for well defined services. This enables development of applications that can utilize the potential of USSD.