A new report from Juniper Research has forecast that 954 million mobile phone users will be using their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018. That’s more than double this year’s anticipated total of 458 million people worldwide, with most of the growth coming from transport-related services.
The report notes that the adoption of mobile boarding passes by airlines has risen dramatically since Barcoded Boarding Passes (BCBPs) were adopted internationally in 2010. It also notes that mTickets have been adopted by metro rail services in Europe and the USA, although Scandinavian metro services have used mobile tickets for several years. Boston’s MBTA, which introduced mobile ticketing late last year in partnership with Masabi, found that mobile transactions accounted for 10% of ticket sales within seven weeks of launch.
However, the report pointed out that the short-term outlook for mobile NFC ticketing was less optimistic, with a lack of implementation standards and relatively slow transaction speeds causing a problem.
Dr Windsor Holden, author of the report and Research Director with Juniper Research, said “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. 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.”
[Whitepaper; report]