Philips, SK Telecom partner for NFC trial in Seoul

Duverne: We'll have this six-month period to work on helping SKT make a number of technology choices.

Aiming to create Near Field Communication (NFC) solutions for network operators and to drive the development and deployment of NFC in Korea and beyond, Philips Semiconductors and SK Telecom (SKT), Korea's leading telecom service provider, have agreed to cooperate on a large-scale, six-month field trial for the said technology in Seoul, Korea in June.

Along with local partners, the two companies will be conducting the field trial within SKT office buildings, providing 400 SKT employees and visitors with NFC-enabled mobile phones that will give them access to services and applications such as payment, ticketing, content download and access control.

"SKT is a prominent wireless carrier and very innovative when it comes to mobile-based services—in particular, mobile payment and ticketing," said Christophe Duverne, vice president and general manager of identification at Philips Semiconductors and chairman of the NFC Forum. "Having the company endorse the NFC technology for us is a very strong sign of its viability."

NFC is a short-range (10cm) wireless technology that aims to combine the functions of a contactless smart card and a reader into one device. It operates in half-duplex mode in an unregulated band at 13.56MHz and can perform secure smart-card emulation, peer-to-peer data transfer and information access.

There will be two implementations of NFC for the Korea trial: 200 mobile phones will have an NFC chip embedded in the design, while the other 200 handsets will use a plug and play extension. "Providing a plug and play option is a way to create scale and do the trials cost-effectively, since handsets won't have to be replaced," Duverne said. This alternative implementation could be sold aftermarket for consumers who want to use NFC in their existing handsets.

Duverne added that SKT will use the trial to better understand the technology and how consumers will interact with it. Trial results will be used to evaluate consumer preferences to ensure that NFC phones will meet their expectations. "We'll have this six-month period to work on helping SKT make a number of technology choices," he said.

Extra services
What makes NFC compelling, Duverne said, is that it embeds contactless smart-card technology into cellphones to offer more services and applications. Since the technology works at a very short range, transactions such as contactless payment, ticketing and access control will be secure enough to be done through mobile phones.

Some examples of these applications to be offered during the SKT trial will involve users paying with their NFC-enabled handsets at select retail locations that have NFC-equipped payment terminals, as well as gaining access to public transportation systems or schedules using their NFC phones. NFC will also be used for identification and access control, giving employees access to the SKT headquarters in Seoul in place of the SKT corporate badge.

Another application SKT is very interested in for the Korea trial is the active poster, Duverne said. Posters will be embedded with content such as ticket information, ringtones and wallpaper for mobile phones, which can be accessed by swiping the NFC handset near an NFC logo. In previous demonstrations, a poster for a concert was embedded with a URL, which, when accessed with an NFC phone, directed the user to the website of the artist.

"The technology enables operators to do a lot of promotional applications in a very convenient way," said Duverne.

In the future, NFC may be embedded in other devices due to its suitability for use in connectivity applications. "NFC is complementary and fully backward-compatible," Duverne explained. "It can be used to trigger or initiate other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. For example, if you want to initiate a Bluetooth connection between a handset and a PC, you can bring the NFC handset up to a PC marked by the NFC logo. Communication is then initiated and will continue over Bluetooth even after the two devices are pulled apart."

NFC can also be used at wireless access points to simplify the initiation and transfer of security profiles. Security profiles and addresses can be stored in a contactless card that can be taken from device to device to initiate profiling.

"The first devices will probably be dongle-based—in the form of SD cards that are NFC-enabled—and built into PCs and consumer electronics devices in late 2006 through 2007," said Duverne.

Mobile phones used during the SKT trial will be equipped with two different NFC implementations: 200 will have an NFC chip embedded in the design, and the other 200 will use a plug and play extension.

More trials in Asia
With the success of previous NFC trials such as in Germany—which recently moved into a commercial service—and Taiwan, Philips is cooperating with Asian operators on more trials that will become public in the coming months.

"We see that the technology is extremely well-accepted in Asia-Pacific, so it's probably the area where NFC will be adopted in large volumes more quickly. We see commercial deployments taking place here in the latter part of 2006," Duverne said. He sees China as a good candidate for quick adoption due to its "strong contactless infrastructure in transportation and a strong wireless infrastructure," but acknowledges that Japan and Korea are also very advanced in this contactless smart-card technology.

"I would definitely not exclude the Philippines because the country has some interesting developments in the wireless world, especially in relation to payment. Thailand [will probably adopt NFC] to a degree as well. There's a lot of stuff happening in this region, so it's hard to tell specifically which country will be the first to adopt NFC technology," said Duverne.

- Selena Salang
Electronic Engineering Times- Asia