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Next RFID test after Manchester City will be mobile phones on the Tube

Sadly, the mobiles on the Tube - London's Underground railway - won't work as mobiles. Rather, they will have built-in Near Field Communications (NFC) payment chips to get on the trains.  Almost certainly, they'll be RFID, now that the US e-passport programme has selected that technology for its first rollout.

The crucial factor, however, is the fact that mobile phone makers see this as a passport to increased sales, as mobile networks try to get into mobile payments.

According to Sean Hargreaves, "soon you’ll be able to travel on the Tube using your phone as a ticket."

The technology is currently being tested in the city of Manchester where  Nokia 3320 handsets, equipped with NFC chips, give football fans access to the stadium.

Hargreaves says the technology will be pervasive on mobiles "within 12 to 18 months" but points out that initial tests are with the RFID chip built into the shell. "Such capabilities will be shipped inside mobile phones from next year," he says, attributing this to Nokia.

RFID isn't the only NFC technology trying to break through. According to ABI Research, WiFi Active is a technology attractive to people selling into hospitals.

"WiFi location system vendors are focusing on healthcare," says researcher Sarah Shah, "because most hospitals have WiFi networks in place and many medical devices are WiFi-equipped for patient monitoring."

The "value proposition," as Shah describes it, "is that they can keep their existing infrastructure and add new elements."

The report suggests that WiFi location system vendors such as Aeroscout, Ekahau, and PanGo will also argue that their technology is standards-based and non-proprietary. "On the other hand, RFID vendors such as RF Code and Radianse point to the wide application of RFID for asset tracking, and their longevity in the industry," says the report.

Nobody is expecting WiFi Active to be the technology used in point-of-sale phones. It has a major technology problem: it reaches too far; and it's complex.

There are phones with WiFi embedded already, so the idea isn't absurd, but the cost of a WiFi system is only attractive if the venue already has WiFi installed for other purposes. WiFi-equipped cash tills are rare and would be costly; installing and provisioning them would be even more expensive.

NXP Semiconductors is not only doing e-Passport work, but has the train-entrance market pretty well sewn up, including the Tube Oyster system.

NXP’s head of business development, Taoufik Ghanname, points out that mobile ticketing has always been behind its strategy as it rolled out its readers.

Sean Hargreaves quoted NXP business development chief, Taoufik Ghanname, saying: “We co-founded the NFC Forum which works on the open standards for this technology, so unlike other access technologies, a mobile capability has been built in to every system we’ve ever installed. So it really isn’t a big leap, we just need the phones with the necessary chips inside and then they can be read just like an Oyster card.”

RFID: usability not easy