Revenues Generated by mobile commerce (m-commerce) will have increased 100-fold to Euro23,5-billion by 2003, only five years after the enabling technology was first introduced commercially in 1998.
"And more than one-third of these revenues will originate in the financial services sector and from on-line wireless shopping," Graham McKay, group technical director at JSE-listed Prism Holdings, said at the Visa CEMEA 2000 conference in Rijhad yesterday (October 2).
He told delegates - representatives of Visa International`s member banks and financial institutions in Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa - that information provision, currently the dominant (91%) revenue generator in the m-commerce arena, will in the future contribute a mere 5% to the m-commerce revenue cake.
In addition to banking and shopping, the most pervasive m-commerce revenue generators will be advertising, business applications, telematics and customer care, followed by entertainment and information provision in 2003.
"Most of the tangible examples of m-commerce today involve the provision of information such as share prices, weather forecasts and sports results, to subscribers cellular handsets. This is understandable because of the immaturity of the components required to make wireless commerce work. "Wireless handsets are only now starting to evolve from the voice-centric devices of the early- to mid-1990s, to the user-friendly, intelligent, data-centric devices required for m-commerce. At the same time, wireless network technology is maturing," he explained.
According to McKay, many countries, including the US, don`t yet have digital cellular networks, and the majority of those that do still use GSM, which is too slow for acceptable data transmission levels. However, significantly faster networks based around technologies such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Service) and eventually, wideband CDMA (code-division multiple access) are being implemented, piloted or planned around the world.
Meanwhile the SIM (subscriber identification module) used in early-generation cellular handsets has also evolved. The new Phase II+ generation platform allows GSM and a host of other applications to co-exist on the cell phone SIM card. And with the SIM card`s memory increasing from 16KB to 32KB, there will be ample capacity on the card to store a host of data and applications, including secure payment.
"But forget the jargon," McKay insisted. "What we will soon have are personal, trusted, interactive, multimedia devices which are programmable and which users will never switch off. Thanks to the new wide bandwidth, networks which will enable network providers to charge for bandwidth quantity rather than time used, making it cost-effective for users to always be connected and contactable.
"More importantly, from a transaction perspective, numerous security requirements including user identification, transaction authentication and secure payment capability will be possible. Applications for business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-business m-commerce will become ubiquitous.
"Indeed, wireless will no longer be a technology - it will be a way of life," McKay concluded.
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