NFC (Near Field Communication) is a way of wireless short-range derivative of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). This is one of the major future trends in mobile telephony as it will add interactivity between mobile and their environment.
An NFC phone can indeed serve as an electronic wallet, identification badge, collector of specific content (advertising material from a poster, for example), Intelligent Key (hoteliers in love …), etc. .
Standardization and development of services
For this revolution take shape, it is necessary that the environment is established, both in the standardization of services and equipment. On the first point, the NFC Forum is working to establish the necessary framework and gradually complete specifications, including communication protocols between SIM card and NFC chip (with the SWP or Single Wire Protocol, for example).
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On services, experiments come validate the procedures and collect impressions of user-testers, to a greater or lesser extent. The side of contactless payment, there is the initiative Pay Mobile in France that meets since the end of 2007 banking institutions and operators to test the NFC mobile payment to merchants and supermarkets.
On the other hand, forums and associations have been created in 2008 to bring together the various actors in the field and share information. This is the case Forum Services without contact, initiated by Luc Chatel, Secretary of State for Industry and Consumer Affairs, which oversees projects on the NFC or the French Association of contactless mobile ( AFSCM), which includes all three French mobile operators Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, and ensures that all work in the same direction (in terms of interoperability services, in particular).
It is also terminals
Finally, all this can not work without hardware: payment terminals, modules NFC and NFC compatible mobile phones. Currently, ,,offer models other than in very limited variations of existing products, used in the experiments underway.
It should be noted that Nokia offers two years of comprehensive NFC mobile terminals, the latest model is the Nokia 6212 NFC Classic, a 3G phone whose production is scheduled for late this year and should be used for pre-commercial pilot.
The harmonization of these three major centers of NFC (standardization, services, equipment) is not easy. However, the market for NFC can not take off until these three elements have not reached a certain level of maturity.
And that’s not counting on the interests of different actors and their desire to control or even lock the market to their advantage, at the risk of delay off the market.
