By INDERIA SAUNDERS, Guardian Business Desk, Inderia@nasguard.com

The local provider of credit card swipe machines is anxiously waiting for BTC to make good on promises to arm Bahamians with multi-media phone services, a move that could allow him to expand his customer base by 10,000.

Paul Fernander of Tripoint Communications is hoping to introduce wireless credit card centers to The Bahamas. It's an introduction that stands to transform Bahamian business by allowing it mobile transaction processing. That means straw market vendors and taxi-cab drivers could roam away from land-line credit card swipe machines.

"Most tourists who come to The Bahamas come with credit cards, with debit cards, or some kind of access cards and not with a bunch of cash," Fernander told Guardian Business. "The whole world is going to a cash-less system and The Bahamas will have to follow suit."

Exactly when that happens, however, depends largely on BTC.

Just last month the crown corporation announced plans to launch mobile content services, branded 'BU' (pronounced "be you"). By piggybacking on that BTC program, which allows internet access from a cell phone, including downloading of data, Tripoint could substantially cut the cost of its wireless service for Bahamian businesses.

While BTC has conducted some Beta testing with a small group of its GSM wireless customers, it has yet to bring the service to market.

"We've completed the initial Beta testing phase for the mobile content," Marlon Johnson, VP of wireless communications, told Guardian Business yesterday, "but we have some further engineering issues we want to address.

"So, we are taking from the test some things to take back to our engineering [department] to ensure that when we do bring it to the public it's working."

It is a corrections process that Fernander is hoping will be done sooner rather than later.

As it stands now, his wireless system operates on two formats: One that runs of GPRS capabilities — a subset of the BTC GSM System — and the other via the Internet through use of land phones. Many of the credit card systems across the nation operate through a phone line, which lengthens the processing time of a simple swipe transaction.

Still, Tripoint has managed to work around the deficiencies in the system by marketing credit card terminals that work with Blackberry phones and some with GSM phones.

But with BTC — once it get BU up and running — Fernander's customers will be able to cut out the costs associated with owning a Blackberry by purchasing a multi-media clip directly.

It amounts to a cost savings of $40 a month, and would bring the technology within the financial reach of thousands of small, "on-the-go" businesses.

Given BTC's monopoly over that telephony technology, Fernander and his customers will have little choice but to wait on that savings.