On 3 Aug, 15:24, Roland Perry wrote:
In message . com, at
06:58:50 on Fri, 3 Aug 2007, W14_Fishbourne
remarked:

The second technology will be to use a chip inside your mobile phone
which will take the place of (and remove the need for) a separate
piece of plastic called a smartcard. You will wave your phone over a
smartcard reader on the gateline in the same way that you wave a
smartcard. It doesn't matter if your battery goes flat during the
journey - the power to read the chip comes from the reader (just as
you don't have a battery in your Oyster card).

Does this mean you have to buy a new phone, or is the RFID embedded in a
new SIM (there was mention of Orange and SIMs earlier).

I believe it'd be a component of the mobile phone itself - see this
link for information on a couple of Nokia models with RFID capability
in the shell of the phone:
http://www.rfid-weblog.com/50226711/...nokia_5140.php
or http://tinyurl.com/yttc3s

Of course an RFID chip need not be independent of the phone - they
could presumably be connected up so that information on the RFID could
be updated by the phone, so for example the credit in an RFID pay as
you go travel ticket (like an Oyster card) could be topped up over the
air. Of course the system could be arranged so that travel expenditure
was debited from the users mobile bill or mobile PAYG balance, without
the need for any such link. The number of various different methods
for how any such scheme might work are many.

I'd imagine that an RFID-enabled SIM might not work, as in many
mobiles the battery would present a barrier between the SIM and any
potential RFID reader in the 'outside world'.


I'm still struggling to understand why this is so much better than
having the same chip in a bit of plastic in your wallet (I go out
without a phone more often than without a wallet) and thread
convergence if you are using a Railcard, you need to be carrying your
wallet anyway!
--
Roland Perry

I share your scepticism.

The 'ticket via RFID embedded in mobile phone casing' idea is just an
extension of the concept of using RFID-in-mobile as a replacement for
cash, a kind of wave-and-pay embedded in a mobile (wave-and-pay being
the upcoming method of paying for small transactions using an RFID-
enabled credit/debit card without the need for a PIN, already in use
in the states).

I'd guess that logic is that a mobile is one item that there's a fair
guarantee that (many) people will have on their person much of the
time, which is a fair enough assumption.

However I'm not sure that people would be that willing to get their
mobile out to pay for small purchases at shops, especially if it was a
flashy new model - someone might pinch it! Likewise at a station -
especially given the advice (on signs and posters) warning people off
of using their mobiles when they get out of a station. Plus I'm not
too sure about any idea of using a mobile on automatic gates - they'd
be the constant clatter of mobiles being dropped and smashing up on
concrete floor as people lost their grip on them, especially at the
rush hour!