The worldwide market for wireless online transaction terminals and systems is forecast to grow from $487 million in 1995 to $1.9 billion by 1999, with wireless partially displacing wireline for a greater share of the overall OLTT market, according to a new study from Probe Research Inc.
In “Wireless Online Transaction Markets,” the Cedar Knolls, N.J.-based company projects wireless systems-which account for nearly five percent of the total $11 billion OLTT market in 1995-will garner 12 percent of a $15.8 billion market in 1999.
The company said that access to constantly updated online information-from inventory control to point-of-sale credit card authorization-has become a necessity for survival in many businesses in the 1990s and online transaction processing is turning to wireless for greater reliability, higher performance and lower costs on metropolitan area networks.
Since the majority of the communication network cost in OLTT systems is at the local loop, the search for alternatives to dedicated, leased lines has been underway for some time, the report notes.
The use of two-way paging networks, cellular digital packet data and digital Code Division Multiple Access for low-volume, point-of-sale transactions will become more prevalent for fixed-location as well as mobile POS applications, because of their flexibility, rapid availability, reliability and cost when compared to wireline systems, the report said.
Probe said in the rest of the world, particularly in Latin American and Pacific Rim countries, decisions already have been made to go wireless because the wired infrastructure, if it exists, is of such poor quality that it cannot provide the level of performance or reliability required for online transaction processing.
