In its latest report, Juniper Research is looking into prospects of mobile ticketing, suggesting that more than 950 million mobile phone users worldwide will use their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018, up from 458 million this year. The growth is expected to be driven primarily within key transport verticals, as well as live entertainment events and cinema ticketing.
The report noted that the airline industry was a particularly strong proponent of mobile ticketing, with adoption of mobile boarding passes rising sharply since the worldwide implementation of Barcoded Boarding Passes in 2010.
However, the research firm also noted that in the short term, the outlook for NFC ticketing was less optimistic, with a lack of implementation standards being a key barrier to interoperability. 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.
According to the report author Dr Windsor Holden, Apple’s decision not to include an NFC chip in the iPhone 5 had a big (negative) impact on the market. Moreover, the outstanding technical issues and the continuing failure of NFC stakeholders to communicate the value proposition to transport operators also play a role, with Juniper not envisaging anything other than ad hoc deployments in the immediate future…