Despite NFC being a mainstream smartphone feature for well over a year now, its adoption still seems very hit-and-miss, with little sign of a concerted effort to make NFC as common as Bluetooth. That’s a problem, at least for the carriers and financial services companies behind plans to popularize mobile payments conducted over NFC. Other uses for the technology, like direct communications between two NFC-enabled phones, are similarly slow to take off, and are even more hampered by a lack of phones with hardware support. Sprint, to its credit, may be able to help do something about the deployment of NFC in smartphones, revealing plans to see the feature included in the vast majority of its upcoming LTE fleet.

Sprint’s director of consumer product marketing, Trevor Van Norman, has disclosed that the carrier is very interested in NFC adoption. To that end, it’s going to see that, whenever possible, phones built for use on its new LTE network will feature the technology. The only exception Van Norman offered would be for the lowest-tier of LTE phones Sprint ends up carrying, where concerns about offering them cheap or free on-contract might preclude the expense of implementing NFC.

Of course, Sprint’s got it’s own interests at the heart of this policy, with Van Norman explaining, “it’s in our best interest to push the service… we want to drive transactions, but it’s to get a cut of the offer.” Sounds fine by us, so long as someone finally does something to put an end to the stagnation that’s been looming over NFC thus far.

Source: Light Reading Mobile

Via: SprintFeed