@Haggai,

USSD could be a good solution. It would cater greatly for scalability, not just as an alternative to SIM cards replacement but also in terms of incorporating additional services on the same platform. All that will be required is tweaking of the sub-menu. 

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Haggai Nyang <haggai.nyang@gmail.com> wrote:

I doubt DTMF would be applicable here since that is only possible on an active voice circuit, and for reasons of scalability I do not see them setting up an IVR-like system for MPESA. If the system is already loaded at times with delays on just USSD requests what of DTMF?

My suggestion was basically for ease of management since by maintaining one menu listing linked to a backend db everyone else would fetch it via USSD and load to their systems would be relatively minimal compared to the other available options. It would also scale well since it's more or less text/binary traffic, not voice packets.

An improvement on scalability would be having a way to store the previously loaded listing on SIM for faster viewing next time and the SIM app would just have to compare the timestamps to know if it has to load a new list. I wonder if the current SIM generation has a facility for this, probably given its limited memory...

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 14:30, ndungu stephen <ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:

@ Haggai

yeah, the queries would probably overload the network, but then again - i dont suppose very many people pay bills via mpesa (except electricity, which is very popular)   - or do they ?

then again, the utilization of signal frequencies like sms,,, dtmf (when you press a number to select) - could be an added plus, since these are not the regular traffic channels..

which brings again the issue of whether their servers can handle the requests - because as more and more people gain confidence in paying the bills over the air, the usage may increase like a bell curve !

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