It’s a dream that has remained elusive, in no small part due to the conflicting agendas of the players in each of the major links of any future mobile payment system.

Now, though, the three major wireless carriers are staking their turf. Today at the Canadian Telecom Summit, Zoompass was publicly launched by EnStream, a joint venture of Bell Mobility, Rogers and Telus. While the service is mildly interesting—it’s simply a way for people to transfer money between Zoompass accounts by SMS text message, with money also available on a special MasterCard PayPass card—what makes this something to watch is how it positions the carriers to call the shots in any more elaborate mobile transaction system.

I chatted earlier this afternoon with Robin Dua, CEO of EnStream. He was lured to Toronto a little more than two years ago from ExxonMobil Corp.’s Speedpass Network initiative, so has pedigree in the contactless payment industry.

A couple of things jumped out from the conversation. First, he thinks that EnStream, because it is closely associated with the three wireless carriers that command 95% of the Canadian marketplace, is in the best position to eventually bring the various parties together, bridging the technological challenges in the wireless network, the mobile handsets, and the business model of processing these financial transactions with banks or credit card companies. But he admitted that there is much to be worked out regarding how revenue sharing would work.

The second thing that strikes me: Dua made it clear that Bell, Rogers and Telus have little interest opening up EnStream to the other new carriers that will soon enter the Canadian marketplace. Globalive, DAVE Wireless, and Public Mobile will be without this kind of application on their phones. Considering the Zoompass service is just starting, it is too early to raise a fuss over the anti-competitive implications of this position, but it could prove to be an issue in the future.

Zoompass will take some work. It’s mostly targeted to smartphones, like the BlackBerry, iPhone and phones running Google Android, and consumers with more commonplace phones will need to open up a mobile browser and could incur data charges in addition to the transaction fees (50 cents, or 3.5% if the money is coming via a credit account). And it will take a lot of marketing to get people to know about the service.

But EnStream is clearly hoping that early gains in this field will let it call more of the shots with all the other players so keen to replace wallets with phones.

The price was not disclosed, but you can bet Bell got a good deal. According to a Globe and Mail story, Wade Oosterman, president of Bell Mobility and the chief brand officer of Bell Canada said his company paid “considerably less” than the $334-million that Circuit City paid for the company five years ago. And you’d certainly hope so, considering the U.S.-based Circuit City, formerly the second largest electronics retailer in that country, is currently liquidating its stores under bankruptcy protection proceedings.

So what did Bell get? At first blush, not much. The Source has about 5% of the fiercely competitive electronics retail market in the country, a segment that is not immune to an economy in recession. As a shopper, I don’t have a particularly favourable impression of the odd mix of products (many of them loud and flashing) on its shelves. Why would Bell want its mobile phones, satellite and Internet services associated with that?

If you read the Globe story, the analysis from the usual suspects is scattershot: Rogers and Telus expanded their retail presences significantly in recent years, but Bell has lagged, so this is an easy way to catch up; The Source’s mall-based stores will help them reach out to women and teens; the stores’ inventory of gadgetry, electronic gewgaws, and high-profit-margin cables, are “complimentary” to Bell’s services; it gets Bell high-profile marketing space.

Perhaps all of the above is true, and taken together, bought at a discounted price, makes this strategy reasonable. But the real kicker is that The Source has a deal with Bell’s competitor, Rogers (which also owns this website and signs my pay cheques), to sell mobile phones and services. So this move takes 750 retail stores out of Rogers hands as of the end of this year. Probably not a huge loss for Rogers, given its been converting its video stores into destinations for all Rogers services, but better for Bell than letting The Source fall into Rogers’ hands.

Nevertheless, it seems strange that BCE, a company that has been persistently divesting itself of any assets that don’t directly tie into its phone, mobile, Internet or satellite services, would suddenly acquire a loud, junky electronics retailer. So I view with some skepticism Oosterman’s remark, “The Source will continue to sell the broad array of products and services that it does today.” For now, perhaps. But ultimately, if this strategy is really going to pay off, I expect to see underperforming stores closed and the remaining ones overhauled.

I interviewed SpinVox founder and CEO Christina Domecq a few weeks ago while she was in town to talk to Rogers and Telus, two of three carriers in Canada that offer the service (SaskTel is the third). “We’re still waiting for Bell Canada to hurry up,” she told me. “Some carriers are faster than others, have a little less bureaucracy.” That may be an understatement.

But Domecq did have nice things to say in general about Canadian wireless carriers—they are her customers, after all. Although prices are high in Canada, she thinks the carriers do embrace innovation as fast as nearly any in the world, save northern Europe. Their size helps: they have the purchasing power for new handsets and services that smaller carriers in the world do not. And to their credit, they received SpinVox’s proposals warmly. “They were much more open to a young U.K. business than they were in the U.S.” SpinVox is a slick application, but it made me wonder if Canadian businesses are more easily impressed by technology with an international flavor than they are of anything homegrown—until it is proven elsewhere, of course.

Also, Domecq did note that carriers everywhere are not aggressively rolling out new applications and services, because it’s an expensive process not only technically, but in the marketing and customer support that goes along with it. “It’s hard in this economic climate, though. It’s not getting easier,” she said. And any application that needs to run on a specific type of handset is at a disadvantage, because the carriers aren’t rolling out as many new phone models either anymore. Again, it’s too costly. SpinVox is fortunate that its service works on any phone.

So what makes Canada a good market for SpinVox? We pay for voice mail (for now–competition from the new carriers might change that), so we’re more willing to pay to make voice mail easier, and we leave the longest voice mails of any country in the world. (Domecq isn’t sure why that is, but I figure it’s because Canadians go out of our way to sound polite.)

At any rate, it was interesting to hear a global perspective on the Canadian wireless industry.

What really perplexes me, though, is that Rogers, Bell and Telus also offer high-speed Internet services, and to my mind, that is the single best example of what happens if you give people open access to data—they get used to it, and most importantly, they will pay almost anything to keep a high level of service. I suspect  I’m not alone in that I pay a premium for the certainty of all-I-can-surf Internet access, even if I’m buying the top tier service when a lower tier might suffice for my surfing habits. Why? Because it’s simple, the Internet is that important to my family, and I don’t have to second guess what my actions online will cost me a month hence. Same goes with my wireless voice plan, for that matter. But not for wireless data—not yet, because I haven’t discovered the applications.

As the NYT story notes about the pull of wireless apps:

Applications spur the use of higher-priced wireless data plans and the purchase of more expensive smartphones. “What is most important for us is to have a customer sign up for a plan,” said Ralph de la Vega, who is in charge of AT&T’s wireless unit. “We think we can have multiple ways to make money.”

This is a matter of consumer trust: if a customer doesn’t really know how much opening up the mobile browser on her phone will ultimately cost, or if she’ll be able to make it work, she’ll just never do it. No one has any idea how many KB are in a web page, nor would they bother to count them, and average people—not the early adopters who reflexively throw money at this kind of stuff—will never get around to experimenting. They don’t want to make some mistake and have it end up costing them. So they freeze, with their thumb hovering over the keypad, and then just put the phone away. I’ve certainly done that many times.

Some of the blame rests on handset makers, because they haven’t made it easy. No one wants to end up paying extra money to their carrier because they couldn’t figure out what buttons to press and went to the wrong site. But that’s changing: the iPhone certainly makes it simple and fun, and that’s why 25 million applications were downloaded from Apple’s App Store in its first 10 days.

It’s important to note, of course, that in the U.S., the price is right for using data on the iPhone. Canadian carriers can do a much better job creating a simple, trustful experience for their customers to discover wireless data services and applications. And once Canadians are hooked, they will pay a premium, even if all they do is check the weather on their phone while they’re already standing outside.

One more thought: locking customers into 3-year plans doesn’t encourage them to upgrade to more data-friendly phones, nor do all the extra charges that come with device upgrades. Maybe the new carriers will spur some innovative approaches.