London Banter - View Single Post

[email protected] · February 28th 17, 12:38 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Roland Perry)
wrote:

In message , at 09:38:56 on Tue, 28 Feb
2017, d remarked:

What's changing in 2018?
Oyster will become like Contactless so presumably they have to find
a way to deal with railcard discounts in the back office system.

Why are they spending money on a fast pickup feature when the need
for one will be gone in a year's time?

My understanding is that current Oyster cards will be dealt with as now,
newly issued Oyster cards will be contactless style.

Err, Oyster have been contactless since they were introduced.

I read the comment as meaning the "new" Oyster card will be in effect
a contactless pre-paid credit card with zero credit loaded, but an
arrangement to auto-topup from a bank account by the exact amount of
any journeys made.

It won't necessarily use a bank account because Oyster is not restricted to
people who have bank accounts.

I presume the balance information will be held in the back office system
rather than in the chip on the card. As I said earlier, I presume this means
that railcard information will be held in the back office system after 2018
instead of on the card now.

In other words, the difference between Oyster and what is currently called
"Contactless" is that the latter has no data written to and stored on the
cards while Oyster does.

--
Colin Rosenstiel