Will BLE really kill NFC?
PayPal today introduced Beacon, a gadget that plugs into any power source and uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and is designed to communicate securely with consumers through their smartphones. Beacon essentially “checks in” shoppers when they walk into the store, alerting the store to their presence, and can conduct transactions when users are ready to check out. And as Hari Gottipati of Apollo Group points out in this informative post at GigaOM, Apple is quietly preparing to launch its own BLE offering in iBeacon. (Apple has yet to provide any details regarding iBeacon, which debuts with the launch of iOS 7.)
There’s a lot to like about BLE, as Gottipati writes: Beacons are very affordable — one company is already selling three for $99 — and the range is long enough that they could be installed in a large retail space for just a few thousand dollars. BLE also eliminates the need to tap the phone against a reader. Those advantages are why we’re seeing plenty of headlines predicting BLE has put another nail in NFC’s coffin.
But while BLE may be the most attractive technology for mobile payments to hit the market, a lot of retailers have already invested heavily in NFC. Berg Insight estimates that 6.7 million NFC-ready point of sale terminals were sold last year, for instance, and that number will surely rise this year. And those retailers are highly unlikely to embrace a new technology until they see BLE — or some other offering — gain traction. Meanwhile, mobile payments providers like ISIS and Google Wallet continue to push their NFC-based offerings. BLE certainly may become the foundation for mobile payments in the U.S. and elsewhere, but that isn’t going to happen quickly.