Just over 950 million mobile phone users worldwide are expected to use their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018, up from 458 million this year, according to a new report from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com).

Growth is expected to be driven primarily within key transport verticals, although latterly significant uptake is anticipated across sectors such as live entertainment events and cinema ticketing. Juniper Research notes that the airline industry was a particularly strong proponent of mobile ticketing, with adoption of mobile boarding passes rising sharply since the worldwide implementation of BCBPs (Barcoded Boarding Passes) in 2010.

What's more, the research group observed that while mobile has for some years been a key ticketing delivery channel across Scandinavian metros, deployments were increasing both elsewhere in Europe and in the US and were achieving strong levels of adoption. At Boston’s MBTA, which introduced mobile ticketing in late-2012, mobile accounted for 10% of ticket sales within seven weeks of launch.

However, the report noted that in the short term, the outlook for NFC ticketing was less optimistic, with a lack of implementation standards a key barrier to interoperability. Furthermore, transaction speed targets have yet to be achieved, providing a further obstacle to widespread deployments and increasing the probability that contactless cards, rather than NFC handsets, will be the primary delivery mechanism.

"We had already scaled back our forecasts for NFC Ticketing deployments in the wake of Apple’s decision not to include an NFC chipset in the iPhone 5," says Dr Windsor Holden of Juniper Research. "Given the outstanding technical issues and the continuing failure of NFC stakeholders to communicate the value proposition to transport operators, further downward revisions were required; we do not envisage anything other than ad hoc deployments in the immediate future.”