Recent surveys draw similar conclusions that NFC commercial roll outs face tough challenges.
The title of an upcoming report from the EE Times Market Intelligence Unit is unambiguous: "A true mobile-payments market likely will not emerge until 2010". According to the study, the development of a broad ecosystem of card-reader subsystems, system-integration tools and dedicated application software has yet to emerge: significant pieces of the software infrastructure for this market are missing and silicon opportunities in NFC may be limited. The director of the EE Times Market Intelligence Unit adds: “If investment-bank conservatism spreads to the consumer banking community, this could postpone mobile-payment NFC to the next decade.”
In a similar way, Strategy Analytics reports that NFC in mobile handsets is likely to remain limited to the trial phase in 2008 (“Enabling Technologies NFC Penetrates 1 in 5 Handset Shipments by 2012”). Vice president of Global Wireless Practice, stated: “Unlike other Personal Area Networks technologies such as Bluetooth, the success of NFC in handsets is reliant on the ecosystem and the monetization opportunities present for all participants in this value chain. For NFC to be a commercially viable solution, we need to move from isolated field trials to a more open approach”.
In this context, French mobile operator Orange admitted that its planned commercial NFC launch in Bordeaux during the first quarter of 2008 turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. According to press source “Cards&Payments” journal, a delay of at least several months is anticipated, due to technical hitches in setting up the infrastructure among retailers, transit operators and other service providers.
