View Single Post
  #36   Report Post  
Old August 30th 17, 11:03 AM posted to uk.transport.london
Someone Somewhere Someone Somewhere is offline
external usenet poster
 
First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Jan 2011
Posts: 466
Default Oyster and Contactless on NR

On 30/08/2017 11:52, d wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 10:10:52 +0100
David Walters wrote:
On Tue, 29 Aug 2017 15:11:29 -0500,

wrote:
From the back office database. Don't they already access that when checking
contactless these days? Recent Oyster & Contactless developments rely on a
degree of connectivity that was but a dream less than a decade ago.


Not in real time as far as I can tell, no. Contactless ticket checks
show on the journey history but take some hours to appear, it seems to
be updated after the event. Gate entry/exits take a few seconds to appear.


I wonder what if anything stops people using duff contactless cards, eg
ones for a closed account or one that was thought lost , cancelled , then foundi
again? Presumably the only check the gate can do is whether the card is from a
valid bank and account type.

Given the frequency that people get cards cancelled these days due to
unauthorised payments etc I assume they must have a refuse list that
gets regularly distributed and updated to the gates - if not it's a
massive revenue hole.

I can imagine though that each card would work once, but for e.g. tube
journeys by the time you touch out again it may well have been flagged
and fail.

Given the price of memory these days, you could easily store a card for
each person in the UK in 0.5GB and CPU processing etc is such that it
could be rapidly searched if organised correctly. Ok - transmitting it
entirely would be tiresome, but presumably you'd only distributed e.g.
minutely updates each of which would only be a handful of cards.