NFC technology

LONDON – The head of London’s large Oyster card program expressed frustration with the pace of development of NFC, complaining the technology isn’t ready for London transit riders to use to pay fares.

Shashi Verma, director of customer experience for Transport for London, criticized the NFC industry, contending payment from NFC SIM cards isn’t fast enough to enable customers to flow through bustling London Underground turnstiles or buses. NFC-based mobile payment also isn’t easy for consumers to set up on their phones, he said.

About eight million customers regularly tap Oyster cards to pay onboard buses, at Underground gates and on other modes of transport, making Oyster one of the largest contactless-payment programs in the world. Verma, who spoke Tuesday at the Open Mobile Summit in London, said he was taking a “contrarian view” during his presentation to try to spur the industry into action.

“Right now, we have eight million customers in London who are attuned to using contactless payment on the transport network every single day,” said Verma. “You can’t imagine a better customer network than this if you want to launch NFC. There isn’t a better opportunity than this anywhere in the world outside of East Asia.

France-based NFC specialist Connecthings has been selected by the cities of Barcelona, Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro and Derry to provide NFC services to local citizens and visitors.

The four cities are all participants in the Living Labs Global Awards, a project involving 21 cities around the world that seeks to uncover innovative solutions to urban issues. Seven hundred companies submitted proposals for this year's awards. Each participating city could only pick one solution and four have chosen NFC proposals by Connecthings:

• Barcelona will deploy NFC contactless services for improving the "digital experience" for citizens and visitors in the city.
• Hamburg, the second largest port in Europe, will use NFC services to encourage the 270,000 cruise passengers who visit each year to spend more time exploring the city.
• Rio de Janeiro will establish a service for disadvantaged local communities, which will work in parallel with "Knowledge Square", a series of urban, technological and social reforms designed to increase digital inclusion.
• Derry will use NFC to improve the experience of living in and visiting the city as well as to promote its cultural heritage to visitors and locals.

All handsets based on chip giant Intel’s current smartphone reference device will carry embedded secure elements in addition to supporting applications on SIM cards.

Intel could control the embedded chip in certain markets, although it plans to work closely with mobile operators as it tries to gain a foothold in the booming smartphone market.

So it could hand over control of the embedded chips to telcos. Or operators could deactivate the embedded chips and issue NFC SIM cards in the Intel-developed smartphones, John H. Vincent, a leader for strategic business development in Intel’s mobile and communications group, told NFC Times.

“Intel’s philosophy on the embedded secure element, we would like to give the customer choice,” he said.

Intel also has hired its own trusted service manager, Germany-based Giesecke & Devrient, to manage the embedded secure elements in those devices in which Intel would control the embedded chips.

NFC microSD specialist DeviceFidelity has unveiled a new version of its iCaisse add-on for the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 that brings full NFC card emulation, tag read/write and peer-to-peer information exchange functionality to the Apple devices for the first time.

The new In2Pay iCaisse 4X is a case for the iPhone that combines the NFC functionality with a battery pack that extends usage of the phone by several hours.

"The new design is an amazingly protective and stylish hard shell two-piece case that allows iPhone owners to simply slide in their phone and instantly enable NFC tag reading and writing, make mobile payments using NFC mobile wallets such as Moneto, gain secure entry through NFC enabled transit readers and share data between other NFC enabled phones," says the company.

"The case itself doubles as an additional source of power complete with an extended battery that is controlled and monitored directly from the case," DeviceFidelity adds. "The iCaisse4X NFC is one of the only extended battery cases in the market with a removable battery allowing users to carry yet another charged battery for extra long extended use period. iPhone owners can also choose from several fun case bands that come in spirited colors such as red, orange, green, purple, silver and clear."

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide appear to be stepping up the pace of NFC phone certifications as they gear up for the launch of more mobile-payment rollouts this year.

The payment networks had certified at least 25 NFC phones between them as of mid-May, including high-end handsets that are not yet on the market, such as the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE, as well as the mid-range Nokia Lumia 610.

The payment schemes hire labs to test the phones for consistent performance and security to run their respective contactless applications, Visa payWave and MasterCard PayPass.

Most of the certified phone models support payWave and PayPass payment applications only on NFC SIM cards, which have to be certified separately.

But seven of the phones are certified to run payment on an embedded secure chip. Most are certified by MasterCard and are intended to support the Google Wallet rollout with mobile operator Sprint. They include the Galaxy Nexus, HTC Evo 4G LTE and LG Viper 4G LTE. For payment, the wallet runs only PayPass applications.