U.S. Cellular Phone Provider Tests NFC

Wireless Wallet includes a mobile commerce service from Obopay, which lets Cellular South customers receive, send and spend money over their phones using Obopay's wireless network service. ViVOtech provides the NFC payment software residing on each handset, and is part of the Wireless Wallet application. It also contributed the over-the-air provisioning of credit cards utilized to ready each card for use.

As part of the trial, participants can use the NFC phones to interact with NFC-enabled posters installed at the pilot locations. The phone acts as a reader, allowing the owner to download a URL encoded to an NFC tag embedded in the poster. Cellular South hosts the web interface that allows the phones to pull information relevant to the poster onto the phone's web browser. Mpact, a ViVOtech reseller, installed the terminals and smart posters at the test locations.

"We're testing NFC technology as part of our overall strategy to become a mobile commerce leader," says Jason Jolly, director of consumer technology for Cellular South. "We think mobile wireless functionality is all about being able to leave your wallet at home," and relying on a cell phone for making purchases or other financial transactions.

According to Jolly, the trial will last until mid-August, at which point the participants will return the phones and complete feedback surveys, which will help Cellular South determine its next steps. He says participants were pulled from a large pool of Cellular South users, from which the company often recruits for new technology deployments.

The NFC trial is not targeted at a specific demographic, because Cellular South is interested in gathering feedback from a cross-section of its customer base. "We want to judge the reaction to the technology from everyone," he says, "from a teenage user to a 65-year-old man, for example."

It's too early to say when Cellular South might roll out NFC phones and services to its entire customer base, Jolly notes. If the trial leads to a permanent rollout, however, he says Cellular South would like to offer the NFC payments and other NFC services to its clients for free, rather than making them fee-based services. "We'd like to work with card issuers and other partners to find ways of making money from the technology rollout."