One2One ploughs lonely furrow in m-commerce field

One2One users must wait another year before the launch of reverse-billed SMS, the payment system behind the most successful mobile commerce applications to date.

Mobile-terminated reverse-billed (MTRB) allows a content company to send subscribers text messages with sports results, news headlines or other useful information, with a fixed charge added to their bill every time a message arrives.

MTRB is a simple and effective way for third-party content providers to build a profitable business, and BT Cellnet, Orange and Vodafone have all made it available already.

However, One2One doesn't plan to launch it "for another year", according to Teletext commercial development director Neil Johnson.

Teletext currently offers a variety of SMS text alerts, based on MTRB, to users on rival networks, but One2One says it will launch a different service, based on a different approach known as mobile-originated reverse-billing, in "a couple of months".

However, according to Johnson, it's a service companies such as Teletext rarely use, accounting for less than 10 per cent of its SMS output on other networks.

Nick Knowles, CTO of mobile information providers Kizoom, said: "MTRB is the only viable m-commerce revenue platform there is at the moment. It's something that people are very comfortable with using."

Users of Kizoom's underground incident alert system can pay by reverse billing or credit card, but 80 per cent choose reverse billing, claims Knowles.

Teletext's Johnson said: "MTRB is a forerunner for the mobile applications that these guys' customers are going to start paying for.

"This is a good chance to start schooling them in the use of these applications. And after all, it's the mobile operators who make most of the money out of this.

"The fact that One2One is planning to do this years after Vodafone first launched [its service] shows how much importance they attach to it." Vodafone launched its service in March 1996.

One2One did not return our calls by the time of publishing.