Last November, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile announced a joint project with Discover, named Isis, to create a mobile payment network that would let subscribers make point-of-sale payments using mobile phones. Now the carriers are saying: Never mind ^[1].

Instead, they’re working on creating a “mobile wallet” that can store information about users’ existing credit cards, rather than forcing them to use a whole new payment system which the carriers and Discover would first have to build. The carriers say they’re in talks with Visa and MasterCard – and they’d welcome Discover at the table as well.

If you’re waiting impatiently to accept mobile phones for point-of-sale purchases, this is in fact good news. A mobile wallet system could theoretically be launched almost as soon as the carriers and credit card companies work out the kinks in their agreements.

Those kinks include whether and how the carriers and credit card companies will split revenue from these transactions, and whether user data will be stored on SIM chips, where the carriers will have access to it, or on near-field communications chips ^[2], where they won’t.

Read more from CNET ^[1].