Orange, SFR & Bouygues Telecom to participate in M-payment trials in Nice (France)

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: France’s leading mobile operators, Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, will be a part of the large scale mobile payment trial in Nice in partnership with urban transit provider Veolia Transport and various banks. The experiment is likely to start the trials in Spring 2010 and will see 1,000 subscribers of each mobile network use handsets with NFC technology to pay for their bus tickets, timetables and consult route information.
Nice’s Deputy Mayor, Christian Estrosi, said that a charter would be signed between the city, the Nice-Cote d’Azur metro area, mobile operators, Nice-Sophia-Antipolis University and Veolia.
Industry minister Luc Chatel said that the Nice project would likely be supported by the central government through an upcoming EUR 3.5 million funding tender by “Forum du sans-contact mobile”.