Extending cellular authentication as a service

Enterprising service providers keep dreaming up and deploying exciting new services. But every time you sign up to such a service, chances are that you have to pick and remember a username and password. A better solution would be to provide a more generic way of authenticating users. For that we need an easy-to-use, strong, and scalable authentication infrastructure. The costliest step in setting up such an infrastructure is the provisioning of credentials, for example in the form of smart cards, to the user. Actually, cellular network operators already have such an authentication infrastructure deployed in subscriber smartcards. But there hasn't been a standardized, generic way to reuse this infrastructure for other service until now.