Financial services firm Visa Europe has said it will launch the V.me digital wallet on a controlled basis in the UK, France and Spain in the autumn of 2012.
The O2 Wallet is the most comprehensive mobile payments service launched to date by an operator in Western markets. And interestingly, although the service is packed full of cool capabilities, such as text-based money transfers, price comparisons and offers, it is not yet enabled for contactless payments. Unlike other players in the nascent mobile payments market, O2 hasn’t chosen to make NFC (near-field communication) the focus of its mobile wallet’s appeal – not like Google Wallet or Quick Tap, the NFC m-wallet service launched last year by rival UK operator Orange. O2 is waiting until NFC handsets and payment terminals are more widely deployed to switch on that capability – but is not banking on it for the success of the wallet.
Telefónica subsidiary O2 has become the first operator in the UK market to launch a mobile wallet offering. The service offers price comparison for online shopping, person to person money transfer and allows the user to digitise cards linked to existing bank accounts, or load money onto an O2 stored value account.
Mobile network operators will not be able to roll out 4G LTE services until 2013 at the earliest, due to technical issues, according to UK regulatory body Ofcom, rendering speculation about whether the spectrum auction will be delayed as irrelevant.
UK regulator Ofcom, has announced that, from June 20th, mobile operators are permitted to trade the rights to spectrum amongst themselves. The new regulation covers 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz spectrum and mean operators will be able to bid for the use of spectrum they believe the have greater need for than other operators.
The UK arm of Telefónica, O2, has released a statement blasting UK regulator Ofcom’s consultation over the forthcoming digital dividend spectrum auction.
The operator is objecting to the use of spectrum floors, whereby at least four operators will get at least 10MHz of spectrum below 1GHz. However, O2 believe that these spectrum floors amount to a state aid, which would make them illegal under EU law.
UK mobile broadband users accessing the web over dongles and datacards are getting average throughput of 1.5Mbit/s, according to research released Thursday by UK regulator Ofcom. But there were significant differences between the five carriers’ performance, with O2 delivering the best performance, and Orange the worst. 3UK outperformed T-Mobile, with which it shares a 3G network.
In this video, taken at TM Forum Management World, held in Ireland this week, Steve Shurrock, CEO of O2 Ireland talks about the ‘digitalisation’ of the health sector and the merging of the phone and the wallet as the operators makes its first moves in the financial services space.
The second and third-placed mobile operators in the Irish market, incumbent Eircom and Telefonica’s O2, have announced that they are to share networks in a deal that Eircom described as the first of its kind in Ireland. Eircom said that the deal will “result in an unrivalled mobile experience for customers” as the two carriers seek to meet growing demand for high bandwidth services.
O2 has staked its claim to be the first UK operator to switch on a 3G network over 900MHz spectrum in London. Taking advantage of recent licensing changes, this latest rollout in London follows on the heels of similar deployments in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester; the London deployment is expected to deliver a 50 per cent increase in capacity and a 30 per cent increase in speed.
A step in the right direction but does it go far enough?
Sharing an allowance among family members is one ...
I agree with Dan about this being a excellent read, and that QNX is not well known but sooner or ...
Excellent read with some actual facts compared to the hack journalist/bloggers on the interest. Many don't understand what QNX ...
The main issue with Telenor is that whether they made underhand payments to ge the licenses. If they did, then ...
Over The Top providers have become the staple wildcard in almost any sector set on a collision path with mobile. By and large they are very good at what they do: connecting a user with their chosen content or service by whatever means available.
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