RE: Begging for phones...
What Jeep was talking about.
Whttps://www.cardtechnology.com/article.html?id=200701298S5JQDOUhat
GSM Association Weighs In On NFC Standards Debate
The largest association of mobile network operators worldwide, the GSM Association, has entered the debate over a proposed standard to connect SIM cards with NFC chips in mobile phones.
The association has endorsed the “single-wire protocol” from France-based SIM card vendor Gemalto. The association hopes the endorsement will speed adoption of a standard link between SIM cards and NFC chips. That, in turn, could help accelerate delivery of NFC handsets to the market.
The endorsement–plus what Card Technology has learned is the withdrawal of the major competing proposal by NFC co-creator NXP Semiconductors–makes it all but certain that standards makers meeting this week in the south of France will recommend the single– wire protocol for the SIM-NFC connection. That recommendation will go to the full smart card committee of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, where it is expected to gain adoption in April.
It means NFC phones and SIM cards supporting the standard could be on the market by the end of the year, say vendors. This would enable mobile operators to allow payment, ticketing and other applications to be downloaded to SIM cards in their subscribers’ NFC phones. The subscribers could then tap the phones to makes retail purchases, pay transit fares and use other contactless services.
While NFC-based mobile phones don’t require any role from the SIM, such large mobile network operators as UK-based Vodafone, Orange of France and Spain’s Telefónica Móviles see the SIM as an important piece of real estate they will own in the new contactless phones that will help them collect revenue from NFC-based services. Today, operators mainly issue SIM cards to subscribers for basic network access.
Most observers agree that unless mobile operators buy into NFC and specify it in their tender requests to handset makers, the technology won’t take off. Near Field Communication is a short-range wireless technology that allows devices such as handsets to communicate with other devices and to emulate contactless cards.
“By the end of the year, 2007, I think obviously if the solution gets standardized, it’s going to create a strong momentum,” says Jérôme Sion, named recently as Gemalto’s mobile contactless director, a new position created by the vendor. “The GSMA has understood that it was important to have a standard and agreement on the technology, so it could be deployed on a large-scale.”
Although pilots of NFC phones involving mobile operators, banks, international payment card organizations and transit companies are proliferating around the world, there won’t be any large-scale deployments until mobile operators are convinced of a business case for the technology, most observers agree. Some observers doubt there will be any significant deployments of NFC phones until late 2008 or 2009.
But a standards debate could have delayed things even longer. The endorsement of the single-wire protocol by the association and planned withdrawal of the major competing option by NXP helps standards makers avoid this debate. Fresh in their minds is the yearlong voting deadlock in 2006 in the ETSI smart card group over a high-speed protocol for mega-memory SIM cards.
The endorsement is part of a larger NFC project the GSM Association launched several months ago. The project seeks to develop a common approach to NFC among mobile network operators, including creating a united front to influence standards, promote interoperability of products and encourage a “reasonable” time to market for NFC-based services.
In November, 14 operators, representing 40% of the GSM market, announced they were backing use of the SIM to store applications in NFC phones. Besides Vodafone, Orange and Telefónica, these included U.S.-based Cingular Wireless, China Mobile and Italy’s Telecom Italia Mobile. Card Technology has learned that giant Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo will also sign on to the GSM Association effort on NFC, likely next month.
It is then, around the time of the GSM World Congress in Barcelona, the association is expected to release a delayed white paper detailing its position on NFC. The white paper will include its support for the single-wire protocol.
Card Technology learned of the association’s backing of the single-wire protocol, or SWP, from a filing the association made a few days ago with the technical committee of ETSI’s Smart Card Platform group. That committee began meeting today in La Ciotat, France. This is the committee expected to recommend to the full ETSI smart card group in April that the SWP be adopted.
In its endorsement of the SWP to the standards committee, the GSM Association said it thought the technology would be the “best fit for the GSMA NFC project requirements.” It rejected not only the competing proposal from NXP, but also one from Japan-based Sony Corp., also a co-creator of NFC; as well as a proposal from handset maker Nokia. The proposals from NXP, Sony and Nokia “seem to be in an early development stage,” wrote the association, adding they didn’t appear to meet the association’s requirements for NFC-based SIMs or those from ETSI. Association NFC project manager Nav Bains was not immediately available for comment.
The SWP, along with the options from NXP and Sony, all propose to connect the NFC chip with the SIM via one electrical wire. Only NXP’s proposal, which it calls “Dioctl,” had any chance of challenging the SWP. France-based card vendor Axalto, which merged last year with Gemplus International to form giant card vendor Gemalto, originally created the SWP, and it was already being used in NFC pilots in France last fall. No. 2 card vendor Giesecke & Devrient of Germany and Franco-German vendor Sagem Orga later threw their support behind it.
NXP submitted its proposal only in late November, after it became clear there would likely be only one spare electrical contact available on the SIM to hook to the NFC chip. NXP had earlier proposed to establish this connection with two wires.
The semiconductor supplier, which makes chips for both SIM cards and NFC, had seen the handwriting on the wall for its new one-wire proposal some weeks ago and had decided to begin work on the SWP. It could see this protocol was gaining support from mobile operators while its own proposal was going nowhere. NXP revealed to Card Technology it will officially withdrawal Dioctl, also known as “S1C,” later this week. The chipmaker, formerly called Philips Semiconductors, launched NFC with Sony in 2002.
“When we listened to the market, it seemed that there was a lot of pressure to get things quickly to market, and standardization is key,” says Jean-François Durix, NFC product marketing manager with NXP. He adds that while NXP continues to believe Dioctl is the better technology, that is, less complex than the single-wire protocol, it will now push for the SWP to become the ETSI standard. “We will definitely contribute to the know-how to make that happen.”
Durix says NXP expects to have SIM and NFC chips on the market supporting the SWP by the end of the year.
–By Dan Balaban (2007-01-29)