Posts tagged Standard

Many people have already written off the SIM card as just a cheap token in mobile phones, used to log subscribers onto their networks and little else.

But the budding rollout of phones embedded with a short-range wireless technology known as NFC could give the SIM an important new role.

Some of the world’s largest mobile operators see the SIM as their best hope for earning revenue from NFC. With the contactless technology, subscribers will be able to tap their handsets just as they do contactless cards to make retail purchases, cover train and bus fares or enter football stadiums.

Such large operators as UK-based Vodafone, Telefónica Móviles of Spain, Orange of France and China Mobile want to store the payment, ticketing and other applications on the SIM, which they issue to subscribers by the millions for network access. But before they order NFC phones, the operators want a standard way to connect the SIM with the NFC chip within the handsets.

Standards makers are meeting this month and are expected to review options for making that connection. Major card and chip vendors are already busy staking out their positions, pushing different technologies they hope will boost product sales.

The standard would become part of a package of changes to the SIM known as Release 7 being drafted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The package would represent perhaps the most significant enhancements ever for the card.

That package also will include a separate high-speed data connection between SIM cards and handsets–allowing operators or their subscribers to download picture phonebooks, home-screen icons and other big multimedia files onto their SIMs. But it hasn’t been easy reaching agreement on the standards package, which officials hope to complete by mid-2007.

The high-speed interface took nearly three years of debate–the last year of it heated–before ETSI’s smart card committee in November finally adopted USB technology. It still is not finalized, with the technology failing to receive the rubber-stamp approval many had expected at a meeting last month of the Third Generation Partnership Project.

Despite concerns about power consumption and other potential technology problems expressed by 3GPP members, the committee was expected to adopt USB for the SIM by the end of 2006 or early this year. That will allow standards makers to begin writing specifications for how vendors will implement USB on cards and the handsets that support them.

Meanwhile, a separate battle could develop over the contactless interface for the SIM, which would hook it into NFC, or Near Field Communication, a short-range wireless technology that lets devices exchange data and to emulate contactless cards.

There are alternatives to the SIM for storing contactless credit or debit applications or the programs that allow commuters to buy transit passes over the network and tap their phones to pass through metro gates. But with the SIM card, mobile operators believe they can charge banks, transit operators and other service providers for downloading and storing their applications on the NFC phones in consumers’ pockets. And most observers agree support by operators for NFC is vital to getting the contactless phones onto store shelves. Operators in many countries heavily subsidize new phones for their subscribers, and they would have to request NFC in their tender documents with handset makers.

One Wire, Two Proposals

The budding competition for how to connect to the NFC chip is pitting a co-creator of NFC against the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer. While not expected to consume nearly as much debate as the high-speed interface, wrangling over the NFC-SIM connection could occupy standards makers for months.

They will review a proposal submitted in late November by Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors, formerly Philips, which with Japan’s Sony Corp. launched NFC in 2002. In the proposal, NXP drops its earlier insistence that the NFC chip be connected via two electrical contacts on the SIM chip. That’s the approach NXP has taken in producing most of the chips the company has supplied to NFC trials launched over the past 20 months. These embedded chips, like the SIM, are tamper-resistant and so provide a suitable place to store applications and their associated encryption keys.

But with mobile operators stating a clear preference for the SIM over separate embedded chips, two contacts have become one too many for the SIM’s link with NFC. That’s because the standard SIM chip offers a maximum of eight electrical contacts, which connect the chip with the electronics of the handset. Five of these contacts are already spoken for to conduct normal GSM or 3G network operations. To hook up the high-speed, USB, interface for fast data downloads between the SIM and handset would consume two more contacts. That leaves one spare electrical pad to connect the NFC chip, which in turn is attached to the short-range radio antenna.

In fact, most of today’s handsets and SIMs only sport six of the maximum eight contacts. So operators that don’t want to offer a high-speed interface using USB–and there will be many–likely will still only have one free contact available on the SIM chip for the contactless link.

Sony is also reportedly dropping its previous proposal to use two contacts to tie the NFC chip with the SIM, as is handset maker and strong NFC backer Nokia. But the proposals expected to get the most attention from standards makers are those from France-based smart card vendor Gemalto and the new bid from NXP.

Both extend a single physical wire from the NFC chip to the SIM card reader within the electronics of the handset, linking up with what is known as the C6 electrical contact on the SIM chip.

Of the two proposals, NXP’s is by far the newest, which is only one of the challenges it faces.

Fearing losing the market to rivals, NXP submitted its proposal after the ETSI smart card committee adopted USB for the high-speed interface Nov. 20–when it became clear a “two-wire” proposal wouldn’t fly. Named by NXP as the barely pronounceable “Dioctl,” the proposal has since been dubbed “S1C” by the industry. (NXP’s two-wire proposal was known as S2C).

But the chipmaker will have an uphill battle to take on Gemalto’s “single-wire protocol,” which was introduced a couple of years ago by France-based SIM card supplier Axalto, now part of Gemalto following its merger last year with Gemplus International.

Head Start

The protocol, known as SWP, is already being used in trials launched this fall, two of which have been made public: French bank Crédit Mutuel-CIC is using it for an NFC payment trial in Strasbourg along with a mobile virtual network operator; and Paris Métro operator RATP and mobile telco Bouygues Telecom have launched a contactless ticketing test in Paris. The SWP got the endorsement in a white paper released in November by French mobile operator association, AFOM, which includes the country’s two largest mobile telcos, Orange and SFR. Both will also use SWP as part of ticketing trials with RATP. The GSM Association, which represents 700 mobile operators worldwide, will come out with its own white paper soon, following its announcement in November that 14 operators, representing 40% of the worldwide GSM market, are backing use of the SIM in NFC phones.

“SWP is one of the options we are assessing,” Nav Bains, a project director of the GSM Association, tells Card Technology. “While AFOM is focused on the French market, one of the GSMA’s priorities is to achieve international standardization and interoperability.”

Too Complex?

Jean-François Durix, NFC product marketing manager with NXP, argues SWP increases complexity in NFC phones, which is not good for a standard. He contends SWP got the nod from the French operators only because it was the most mature single-wire proposal available at the time. NXP had yet to submit its new proposal.

Durix says SWP hands off too much of the processing of the contactless transaction to the NFC chip. With its own proposal, NXP makes the NFC chip “a simple and transparent transceiver,” passing data back and forth between the contactless reader and the SIM card. The SIM processes not only the payment or ticketing application, but also handles many of the higher-level protocols now run by contactless chips in cards, including initialization and anticollision (enabling a reader to distinguish among multiple contactless devices).

“The NFC chip in our solution is a dumb modem,” he says. “Our proposal to ETSI is a good technical way to guarantee NFC phones with SIMs work on existing contactless infrastructures rolled out worldwide." The NFC chip then serves purely as a contactless interface for the SIM, which becomes, in effect, a contactless card, says NXP.

Gemalto declined to comment on the NXP proposal, calling it too new. “More time is needed to characterize all those solutions,” says Gabrielle Bugat, senior vice president of wireless high-end card products.

Delaying Tactics?

But NXP competitor Inside Contactless of France disputes NXP’s contention the single-wire protocol is more complex. Inside supplied the NFC chips used in the two publicly announced French trials involving SWP. The vendor has a lot riding on SWP winning the standards race.

“Now they’re (NXP) trying to delay everything so they can introduce a few more features,” says Philippe Martineau, head of NFC business at Inside. “It (Dioctl) has not the level of maturity of SWP.”

Bruno Charrat, a developer of Inside’s NFC chip, which the vendor calls “Microread,” says SWP offers the flexibility to process the higher-level contactless protocols in either the NFC chip or the SIM or splitting the tasks. With NXP’s proposal, the SIM would do all the processing, and would require the dedicated hardware and software to accomplish this.

Moreover, just handling the low-level contactless operations on the NFC chip would strip the phone of its ability to serve as a reader, as well as emulating a contactless card, argues Charrat. As a reader, subscribers could, for example, tap their phones on chip tags embedded in “smart posters” to capture promotional information, bus schedules or URLs to open mobile Internet sessions. “SWP can manage card emulation and reader functions,” he says. “NXP (with Dioctl) can’t do a smart poster.”

Emergency Mode

NXP denies that, stating clearly in its proposal to ETSI its one-wire protocol allows NFC phones to emulate both cards and readers, as well as exchanging data in “peer-to-peer” mode, another promising feature of NFC. And the vendor contends its new proposal won’t delay ETSI’s standards work.

Read the full story in the forthcoming January edition of Card Technology, including the debate over whether NFC ticketing applications will work if the handset’s battery runs down.