According to Berg Insight, global sales of handsets featuring near field communication technology (NFC) witnessed a 300 per cent increase in 2012 to reach 140 million units.
Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.2 per cent, annual shipments are expected to reach 1 billion units by 2017. Wider adoption of NFC in mobile handsets began in 2011 and accelerated in 2012 when the top ten handset vendors launched nearly 100 NFC-enabled devices.
NFC technology enables numerous applications, such as information exchange, device pairing for establishing Bluetooth or wide local area network (WLAN) connections, access control, electronic ticketing and secure contactless payments.
However, the research firm anticipates that stakeholders will take some time to concur on business models for payment networks and access to secure elements that store user information in NFC-enabled handsets. As per the firm, the technology has become a compelling one for smartphone vendors today, owing to the multiple possible uses for NFC, as opposed to a single ?killer? application. It adds that the scope of applications will be enhanced further once developers gain experience with NFC and obtain access to a larger installed base of compatible handsets.
Further, connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth, WLAN and global positioning systems (GPS) are already standard features in most smartphones. Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets increased to 700 million units in 2012 and the attach rate reached 44 per cent. Several new WLAN standards and certification programmes are now being adopted to enable new use cases and improve the user experience when using WLAN in handsets. Wi-Fi Direct technology facilitates making device-to-device connections to enable content sharing and wireless connection to peripherals. Wi-Fi Miracast enables peer-to-peer high definition video and audio streaming without cables, for instance between a smartphone and a TV. Wi-Fi Passpoint enables mobile devices to discover and connect to WLAN networks automatically without user intervention.
