Near Field Communication got a little more support this week when two wireless carriers in China jumped on board. China Mobile and China Unicom are the latest companies to support the NFC technology in smartphones that allows users to pay for something without using their wallet. The two companies both said they plan to bring the technology to their customers and join the 43 other companies around the world that support the technology. Global rules and standards for NFC technology are being put together by the GSM Association (GSMA).
Getting support for the NFC technology movement in China is a big deal since the country has the highest number of mobile connections in the world. The over 940 million mobile connections in China are more than Europe and United States combined. China Mobile and China Unicom account for about 800 million of those connections. In a study released this week, about 3 billion of the 6 billion worldwide mobile subscribers will be located in the Asia Pacific region, by the end of 2011. Those mobile connection numbers are expected to rise to over 4 billion by the year 2015. That would account for almost 40 percent of the total worldwide connections via mobile devices. In 2010, China had the largest number of connections.
Support for the NFC technology, which actually turns your smartphone into a virtual wallet of sorts, is coming around slowly, but has been gaining steam of late. With NFC technology in a smartphone, users can make a purchase simply by waving their smartphone in front of special scanners that would be installed at participating retailers worldwide. Support is rising worldwide, but at this point it looks like getting retailers on board is the hard part. Retailers would have to get equipped to handle the payment option, which could mean upgrading registers at all locations.
China Mobile is one company that has a lot of subscribers and the company made a statement saying they had the capacity to move the NFC technology forward. One thing other companies like China Unicom wanted to know was whether the technology would be interchangeable between mobile operators so that customers could roam with it no matter what their location is. Secure payments is a hot topic and as long as NFC technology can be proven as a safe payment method, it will be popping up on more smartphones.
