PayPal is showing off its mobile strategy at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. The company is using the conference to announce some new mobile partnerships and products.

The eBay Inc.-owned payment company announced today the launch of its PayPal Carrier Payment Network. According to the announcement, the network will make mobile carrier payments more viable for a wider number of online merchants. PayPal said it will work with its more than 250 carriers and 1,500 digital merchants to expand the carrier payments

To make the new initiative work, PayPal said carriers will need to adopt new standards to help optimize user experience, increase flexibility of carrier payments as a payment method, and increase payout rates for merchants to expand carrier payments across the entire digital goods industry.

That last issue, carrier payout rates, has been a particularly touchy issue with digital merchants as carriers sometimes take upwards of 40 percent of a transaction when consumers place a purchase on their monthly phone bills.

Direct carrier billing is not a space PayPal has been active in but is increasingly important for mobile payments as consumers user their phones for accessing gaming and social networking sites. The space has been active in the past few weeks, with carrer biller Boku announcing a partnership with payment giant MasterCard.

In addition to the PayPal Carrier Payment Network, PayPal announced it has partnered with Spain’s leading ticketing company Entradas.com. The partnership will allow consumers to save time and skip lines by buying tickets with a mobile phone and PayPal. PayPal said that Entradas.com has seen more than 15 percent of its customers use PayPal to purchase tickets in the weeks since it became an available payment method on the site. 

PayPal also announced it is collaborating with hotel chain Yotel to let consumers book a room at Yotel’s flagship hotel in New York or its London Heathrow & Gatwick and Amsterdam Schiphol airport locations using PayPal.

For more stories like this, visit the Direct Carrier Billing research center.