Yesterday, Xie Yuqi, an official from MIIT said, The People's Bank of China and the three telecom operators and China UnionPay discussed mobile payment standards together.
The move would quell a long-simmering debate about the merits of using local versus global technologies and focus the enormous resources of the country's telecom operators and banks on accelerating the roll-out of handsets and point-of-sale terminals.
Mobile payment is slowly gaining traction in China, with systems already in place in top-tier cities for subways, supermarkets, convenience stories, cafes, and fast food chains. China's mobile payment market size is estimated at $417 million in 2010, up 45% from 2009. Users are expected to nearly double to 150 million. These numbers mostly reflect niche forms of mobile payment, from IC embedded traffic cards to online payments made from a handset.
Xie also pointed out that There have been some communication problems with the development of mobile payment business, and the industry should to study and resolve these. " Building a unified mobile payment standards is the most important task. " he added.
Currently, the three operators choose different standards. China Mobile chooses 2.4GHz mobile payment standard and don't give up 13.56MHz, China Telecom chooses 13.56MHz and don't give up 2.4GHz, China Unicom's mobile payment service is based on the NFC technology with 13.56MHz. ( By Rosa )