Telcos in China, Japan and South Korea reportedly will work together on cross-border NFC-enabled mobile payments and, as reported earlier, support WiFi hotspots in the three countries. (in Chinese) Users of one country can make payments with NFC-enabled phones and enjoy cheaper data rates when in the other two countries.
China Mobile, Korea Telecom and Japan’s NTT DOCOMO plan to jointly establish an East Asia NFC Zone. NFC (Near Field Communication) is wireless short distance communication protocol. Your information will be embedded with the SIM card of a NFC phone. With just a simple tap as you do on bus, you could have done the payment and file transmission within a second.
What troubles you most when traveling? Probably, people will name them as money change, hotel check in, local public transportation and shopping at convenience stores etc. With NFC, you will get away from those troubles with just a simple tap of your handset. NFC is believed to be one of the future travel payment channels.
But there are only a small number of smartphone models are NFC-enabled while the majority including iPhone don’t support NFC. Most merchants in China don’t accept NFC payments.
As reported earlier that Korea Telecom, Taiwan’s Far EasTone, and Japan’s NTT DOCOMO planned to support cross-border WiFi hotspots. None of China’s three operators joined in it, but it is said China Mobile will join a global project that is joined by Korean Telecom, NTT DOCOMO and telecom operators from US and Europe. With WIFI roaming, it is for sure that our data usage while travel overseas would be much cheaper.
This post was originally published on Chinese tech news site TechNode, a media partner of VentureSquare and StartupTree.
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