Mobile communication is really going mobile according to Juniper Research which says half a billion people worldwide will use their mobile devices as travel tickets on metros, subways and buses by 2015.
According to the Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets report, the practice of using mobile phones for payment in public transport will spread from its stronghold in Japan to Europe, and could quickly reach five times the usage numbers it generated last year.
Whilst SMS ticketing is not exactly new for some of Scandinavia, Central & Eastern Europe, Juniper Research says applications like Near Field Communications (NFC) and mobile bar codes will help spread the technology further still.
Indeed, many a metro across Europe is already prepping itself for the transient mobile masses by installing contactless payment systems, which can be used easily with many newer smartphones, including the Nexus S.
NFC ticket usage is forecast to grow significantly beginning in 2013, says the report.
It’s not just trains, but planes too that will be getting the mobile ticketing boon, with mobile barcode boarding passes already starting to make an impact worldwide.
“Whether by expansion of SMS and bar code delivery or by NFC, at Juniper we see convenience and choice for users as key advantages of mobile ticketing,” said report author Howard Wilcox. However, he cautioned, “it will be 2013 before large numbers of NFC enabled devices are in peoples’ pockets.”
The report also goes on to posit that Western Europe, the Far East and China will be the leading transport mobile ticketing regions by volume in 2015, but that poor user experience – such as bar code reading issues – is an implementation risk.
