UK Carriers Join Up For NFC

UK carriers Everything Everywhere, O2, and Vodafone have recently joined up together to put together a NFC mobile payment system in the UK. Together as a group the carriers will take care of sales, delivery, payment while individually they will offer their own services on top of it all, which I guess will help set them apart from one another.

However unlike Google Wallet services in the US, the UK carriers have opted for a SIM card based NFC system, meaning that instead of the phone identifying the user, the SIM card would be the one that identifies the user instead, meaning that when you swap phones all you would have to do is put in the SIM card that is normally used for NFC and you will be able to continue using the NFC payment system with no interruptions.

The group plans to have the system deployed by the end of the year pending clearance from the UK competition officials. No word if it’s just limited to Android phones or will it be open to all devices with NFC, although right now it looks like the Android platform is leading with NFC technology, but Blackberry users who want NFC could take a look at the Touch 9850.