Can Bango, Paypal help WAP fight back?

BRITISH MOBILE payment specialist, Bango, has teamed up with Paypal to enable mobile phone to purchase content using their existing Paypal accounts. It provides an easy route for content providers to sell to a wider range of handset owners.

At present, many mobile phone owners have limited means of paying for mobile content like ringtones, games, wallpapers and smut. They're often restricted to direct payments from their phone bill or via premium rate text message (Premium SMS).

Consequently purchases are often made in multiples of £1.50 - the standard rate for a Premium SMS. With O2 on the verge of launching an i-mode service where content comes directly off the handset owner's bill, content pricing will be much more flexible. I-mode handset owners could pay just 99 pence for a ring tone, for example.

That would leave WAP phone owners at a disadvantage. Not if they sign up to the new Paypal mobile service and register their handset number with the service, however. The next time they want to purchase a ringtone, they can pay 99 pence by Paypal and Bango will settle with the content provider.

“Providing consumers with different billing options [like Paypal] will help spur the growth of mobile entertainment services especially in regions like North America, where most consumers are on networks that are still closed to off-portal content and billing,” said Tuong Nguyen, an analyst with Gartner. µ