Talking about the mobile revolution

If there's to be a payments revolution of any sort there has to be a business case, entrepreneurs able to make it happen and, along the way, trials of the technology.

One of the latter is under way in Melbourne.

NAB, Telstra and Visa will trial a contactless mobile phone payments system for small transactions of under $35, with 12 merchants and 200 Telstra and NAB staff armed with Sagem MY 700X handsets.

The demonstration yesterday featured VIVOtech readers connected to the Optimum T 4220 Hypercom terminal. The trial will feature over the air provisioning and disablement, a joint Telstra/NAB help line and promotional posters embedded with smart tags that allow consumers to download merchant offers.

NFC ecosystem vendor CASSIS International will run a Trusted Service Management system for the provisioning and application specific functions from Malaysia.

A demonstration transaction at a coffee shop in NAB's Docklands headquarters yesterday took about four seconds to finalise.

A media release from NAB suggested that customers could make purchases "by waving their mobile phone over a participating NAB merchant's reader," but the reality seemed slightly different. The handset had to be held very still and very close to the reader for one full second before the transaction would register and a receipt appeared from the terminal. Sagem says that the handset exhibits slow performance with Visa's VSDC applet but should improve with the qVSDC.

Teething problems have also been reported with the phone's first generation NFC chip, manufactured by Inside Contactless.

Sam Skontos, Sagem Australasia's general manager of mobile communications, said the company was committed to developing NFC handsets and was involved in "about twenty" NFC trials around the world.

"We can't compete on volume with the likes of Nokia, but we can specialise in this kind of technology."