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[email protected] · November 15th 14, 01:49 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article ,
(Paul Corfield) wrote:

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 18:20:00 -0600,
wrote:

In article ,
(Kevin Ayton) wrote:

Paul, you are right - it is a very opdd explanation.
It seems to have conflated two issues. Yes, there are some
constraints within ITSO which can prevent certain letters being used
in certain circumstances to record a route number in a trasnaction
record. But that can be circumvented, and in any case the transaction
record doesn't have to show the same route number that the public
sees.

More likely the ITSO on Prestige rollout hasn't hit all the buses
yet. The buses need both the ITSO 'shell and product keys' so they
can read the ENCTS cards and the concession products on them., and
they also need the 'commercial rules' to know that they can accept
these cards. My guess would be that one or the other hasn't bee
completed yet.

Just my £0.02 contribution

Don't they all have to handle ITSO cards now to allow Southern's "The
Key" card to be handled correctly and charges deducted?

You are right that Southern's Key does have to be handled by buses in
terms of processing a Travelcard held on the card. I am not sure that
any charges can be deducted because PAYG does not work on ITSO cards
in the same way as for Oyster. That does raise a little question in my
head as to what happens if someone has an Out Boundary Z26 travelcard
on a Key Card and travels by train into Zone 1. Do they get penalty
fared?

AIUI ITSO relies on "product definitions" being recognised by readers.
If the definitions of English concessionary permits haven't been
loaded then cards can't be processed. I do think the readers
recognise the presence of an ENCTS ITSO card though. I'm sure I've
seen people present them on TfL buses and the error beeps sound. I
assume the definitions for Travelcards and national rail tickets into
the zonal area have been loaded on the TfL readers for Key and C2C
Smart users.

Aha! The Southern product is more limited than I understood. We are looking
forward to their developments in Cambridge now of course. Indeed if you try
to buy a ticket from the GTR web sites they all go to the Southern site. We
are promised "The Key" real soon now.

--
Colin Rosenstiel