Monthly Archives: October 2009

SIM-Centric or not?

Posted by on October 26, 2009 No comments

According to the post on NFCNews, Nokia release its first NFC handset which holds the NFC application on the SIM card, rather than the handset itself.

Well, let’s go through the concepts first. We can say that the heart of an NFC system is the secure element. Secure element refers to the IC (integrated circuit) which hosts the application, which stores the data and communicates the NFC reader. The data stored in the secure element can be financial balance, cardholder data, ticket contract details (on a transport ticketing application), etc and it’s protected by at least DES or TDES keys. The physical communication layer is actually an antenna attached to the handset. In the first generation NFC handsets, both the secure element and the antenna was integrated into the handset.

The place of the secure element actually directs us to the party who controls what application to install or what application not to! If you define the secure element as the SIM card, that means that the owner of the SIM card -which is the mobile network operator- decides what applications will be installed for using with the contactless interface. Before the introduction of the Single Wire Protocol (SWP), this was almost impossible. And there was no business model, either. Now it’s quite clear. Thanks to ETSI, now there’s a standard for this and I think that this will eventually lead to a SIM-Centric NFC world.

On an NFC event held in Istanbul, Turkey on May 27-28, product manager from Nokia (I can not remember his name, sorry) told that at least half of the Nokia phones would have NFC capability in 2-3 years. (I can not remember the exact figures either, but it was something around this, maybe even more) This means that a lot of people will have a contactless device in their hands -even if they don’t want to- and there will be a huge battle for installing an NFC application on a phone. I asked him if Nokia would have both SIM-Centric and handset-centric phones or not. He responded in a very politically correct manner that the market will decide on this.

Just imagine what can you do with this power: You can top-up your transportation card, use it with your phone, check the balance any time from your phone. You can display the last 2-3 transactions from your phone, which bus or tram did you take last time and how much did it cost. You can even top-up by using your airtime. It opens a whole new world, things are shining on the bright side. And this is all happening by using OTA services provided by the network operator.

However, there is a dark side of course. Third party application owners and developers need to negotiate with the mobile network operators. They can not do anything that the operator is not happy with. Let’s say you have a distribution channel and you have a project for adding NFC support so that people will have the chance to use their NFC enabled phones for downloading content. Well, you need to deal with the operator(s) and try to find a way to find a business case for the operator. Good luck.

Briefly, it seems we will have a SIM-Centric NFC world coming and need to prepare for this.

Contactless reader device for home use?

Posted by on October 16, 2009 No comments

According to the post at NFC News, ASK released a contactless reader device for home use. Reader is connected via USB port and is compatible with all popular contactless card types.

Contactless readers attached to PC over USB port has been available in the market for a long time. Aiming the end users who has a contactless card for transportation, it’s a very nice feature for both the user and the operator to top up the card at home. The user is free to top up any time and the operator gets rid of distribution channels cost for top up. Everyone is happy.

On the other side there are very obstacles for this dream to come true: It’s quite hard to distribute the readers and the software to the end users. Who will be in charge of the cost of the reader and the software?  How secure is to give the card holder the ability to trace the transaction at his/her own PC? For the power users things may be easy but for the average people it will be hard to install the driver of the reader, software and the connect to a financial service for top up.

We will see how successful will the reader become…

Transportation task force from GlobalPlatform

Posted by on October 6, 2009 No comments

Access control applications and transportation systems were the “killer applications” that caused the boom in the contactless cards. Access control systems are generally do not require anything more than a unique id, but transportation systems are more complex.

Speaking generally, two products dominate the contactless transportation installations: NXP‘s mifare family and the Calypso family, which are famous from the ISO 14443 Type A and B, by the way. Mifare has been dominant for years, but with the security leak that was imposed by the German CCC has been quite a barrier for Mifare lately. NXP responded with Mifare Plus, which is a product designed for migrating the current systems without changing the card media. I think it’s a very good move.

In the last 3-4 years, we saw that banks are trying to penetrate into the contactless transportation systems. Unfortunately the technology that the banks have -EMV- can not respond to the transportation ticketing requirements. Both Visa and MasterCard are working on this.

On the other hand, I saw a very interesting news on Near Field Communications World.com about GlobalPlatform‘s new task force on transportation systems.

I think this will eventually lead to more standardized schemes in the transport ticketing world. Both NXP and Calypso already have compliant products with GlobalPlatform. But the effort that the GlobalPlatform itself will make more efficient affect, not just on the cards, but the readers and terminals as well. It’s also important in terms of NFC based payment scenarios in the transportation since the GSM world will be using a SIM-centric systems based on GlobalPlatform standards.

Payez Mobile

Posted by on October 1, 2009 No comments

The most active community about the NFC world is definitely the French one. There has been a pilot ongoing since the last year and the results are (as almost all pilots) pretty positive. Now France is taking another step and setting up the standards for NFC based mobile payments for Europe.

AEPM (Association Européenne Payez Mobile) was founded by French banks and mobile operators for standardizing the NFC payment systems and now they have another version of standards which is freely downloadable from here.

France was the first country in the world to start the nation wide smart card deployments and they are still in the lead of smart card technology. It’s not a chance that almost all the big card and POS companies are France based.