On 29-Feb-12 03:12, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 14:13:12 on Tue, 28 Feb
2012, Adam H. Kerman remarked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avantix_Mobile

Right. I didn't think those were wireless devices.

That's probably right. I thought perhaps they had a version with GSM/3G
data built in, but perhaps not. As a result, the range of credit/debit
cards they can accept is restricted.

However, if the transaction appears suspicious then the ticket seller
can opt to make a mobile phone call to obtain authorisation.

I wasn't thinking about ticket-printing machines, per se, but getting
back to another discussion we had in which the credit card number
itself is used as the ticket medium and the passenger gets billed for
all passage at the end of the month.

I've never encountered such a scheme.

There's a proposal to do *daily* billing via paywave credit cards for
travel in London, but I don't know how they propose to "inspect" the
ticket, because you can't 'load' one onto a credit card. I suppose
they'd need to use your credit card number to make an enquiry from their
own merchant account, to confirm you'd "touched in" recently.

Depending on how the fare scheme is organized, it's possible the readers
could just record the card numbers they "see" during the day and upload
them to a central server at the end of the day; the central server would
then figure out the correct fare(s) to charge for the day, based on the
when(s) and where(s) each card had been "seen".

For instance, in many places there are daily and monthly passes; the
logical way to handle that with daily billing is to charge the daily
rate for the first several days the card was "seen" each month and then
stop billing when the monthly rate is reached. Likewise, if there is a
single-ride rate, then within a single day the single-ride rate would be
charged each time the card was "seen" until the daily rate was met.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking