NFC set to be the new mobile mantra

The technology is being successfully used in parts of rural India.

Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled mobile phones are yet to catch the fancy of the urban population. The technology, meanwhile, has proved to be a major boon for small farmers and daily labourers in remote villages of Andhra Pradesh's Medak and Warangal districts.

In Warangal district, for instance, the programme has been rolled out in 147 villages where the villagers use NFC technology to get their social security pension from the national rural employment guarantee scheme.

In Medak too, villagers use NFC to operate their savings accounts. Using a NFC-enabled mobile phone and contactless RFID smart card, bank agents are able to help farmers and labourers in the un-banked regions of the state to make transactions from their bank accounts.

The pilot project, which was rolled out by 'A Little World', a provider of the ZERO mobile platform for inclusive banking, aims at setting up micro banks in every village in India.

NFC is a short-range wireless connectivity technology that enables consumers to securely exchange and store all kinds of information, simply by bringing two devices close together.

Evolving from a combination of contactless identification and networking technologies, NFC enables convenient short-range communication between a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) card and an NFC-enabled mobile phone, or between two NFC devices.

Rajiv Sen Gupta, programme director, A Little World, explains that bank agents carrying an NFC-enabled mobile and a machine for biometric finger print readers and a WiMAX terminal printer travel to each village.

The farmers have been given smartcards that contain the identity of the customer such as name, address, photograph, fingerprint templates and relevant details of the savings or loan accounts held by the issuing bank.

The NFC-enabled phone, after verifying data from the smartcard, sends its back to the concerned bank through another NFC enabled portable device. The person also gets a receipt of every transaction he makes through the terminal printer. "The whole process takes about three minutes per transaction," he adds.

Rajiv Mehtani, vice-president & managing director, NXP Semiconductors, says: "An NFC-enabled mobile phone acts as a branch of the bank by storing the entire database of customers in the village and neighbouring areas within the phone's memory."

The technology which was co-developed in the year 2002 by NXP and Sony, is set to rock the markets in the next three years, when about 25 per cent of the mobile phones "" to be available in the market "" are expected to have NFC capability.

A person using his NFC-powered mobile phone, will be capable of making payments using mobile phones as debit cards, access control, storing data, card reader, e-tickets and electronic business cards.

NFC-powered mobile phones could also work as access card to public transport system, storing video and audio files to play those in NFC enabled PCs, loyalty cards and carrying the personal records.

Currently, leading mobile vendors like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Erricson and Benq have rolled out at least one model with NFC technology. However, this is only a small one per cent of the total number of mobile phones being rolled out in the market at the moment.

Globally, a number of NFC trials have been conducted to validate the user-friendliness of the technology. Between October 2005 to May 2006, France Telecom, Groupe LaSer, Orange, NXP and Samsung had conducted a trial among 200 users in the city of Caen in France for secure payment in selected stores, getting access control and downloading information about tourist sites. A similar trial was conducted in the city of Atlanta between December 2005 to June 2006.

In April 2006, the commercial roll-out of NFC-ticketing was deployed in the city of Hanau near Frankfurt. The Nokia 3220 NFC mobile phones were used as electronic bus tickets and act as loyalty cards for discounts at local restaurants, shops and attractions.

"Every indication suggests that NFC will become an inevitable part of mobile phones in the days to come, when consumer will understand the significance of the technology to its full extent," says Bhagawat Gahane, programme manager, NXP Semiconductors.

Adds Otto Chrons, Director of Technology, Sasken Finland: "The full potential of NFC technology can only be unleashed when solutions are truly interoperable and can span geographies." Sasken had recently announced joining the NFC Forum, a non-profit industry association advancing the use of NFC technology.