Just over 950m mobile phone users worldwide are forecast to use their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018, up from 458m this year, according to a new report from Juniper Research, but NFC ticketing will be slower to hit the mainstream than the analysts had previously expected.
"In the short term, the outlook for NFC ticketing was less optimistic, with a lack of implementation standards a key barrier to interoperability," Juniper says. "Furthermore, transaction speed targets have yet to be achieved, providing a further obstacle to widespread deployments and increasing the probability that contactless cards, rather than NFC handsets, will be the primary delivery mechanism."
"We had already scaled back our forecasts for NFC ticketing deployments in the wake of Apple's decision not to include an NFC chipset in the iPhone 5," says Mobile Ticketing Strategies report author Dr Windsor Holden. "Given the outstanding technical issues and the continuing failure of NFC stakeholders to communicate the value proposition to transport operators, further downward revisions were required; we do not envisage anything other than ad hoc deployments in the immediate future."
Last week, Gartner cut its NFC payments forecast by 40%. Berg Insight, however, forecast that one in three mobile phones in circulation in 2017 will come with NFC.