mCommerce: Ready To Roll (cont.)

Building mCommerce Today

In Euro land, Sonera SmartTrust has a development and marketing agreement with MasterCard and a commercial service is scheduled for the purchase of ski lift tickets. Sonera also has a GSM mobile payment service that can be used with Visa, Eurocard and MasterCard. This is based on SMS (Short Message Service) text messages. As well as a whole slew of announcements from vendors, mcommerce is heading down the standards path. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is spearheading a worldwide partnership program in an attempt to establish a cross-industry standards body. The basic idea is to have operators, payment authorities, banks, smart card and network equipment manufacturers all working together to address business models, security issues and technical standards. It's a commendable objective, but cracks have already appeared. The CDMA Development Group claims that they are being excluded and ETSI says it is not; all that's required is support for all 3G CDMA modes, including W-CDMA.

There is a danger that the program could end up being focussed on GSM or IMT 2000 and this is definitely what global players like the credit card companies do not want. Another challenge for ETSI is to get the banks involved. In this case the issue is the ability of operators to turn their billing systems or SIM cards into payment systems, i.e. become de facto mcommerce banks.

Whether a standard emerges or not is unclear, but one thing is certain: it will take time and the market is not prepared to wait. The three heavy mobile hitters - Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia - are therefore developing "an open and common industry framework for secure mobile electronic transactions. " We also have the Radicchio initiative, which is a global body of companies, organisations, manufacturers and groups with an interest in PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). The stated aim here is "to act as an industry voice and authority promoting common PKI standards to unleash the potential of secure wireless commerce globally."