April 25, 2012 | krowne | 10 Comments

GUEST POST: OSPT and Samsung – a partnership gathering speed

By Jörg Suchy, Samsung Semiconductor

Throughout all areas of the mobile industry, the key message right now is collaboration. We are now seeing marked efforts to enable users in 2012 and beyond to engage in new technology. This commitment is widespread, at the recent MWC exhibition in Barcelona alone, there was public discussion throughout the conference, pledging to create a smart phone for emerging markets for under $100. In addition, in the press we are also seeing MNOs moving more and more towards unlimited data packages for customers as part of their tariffs, so as not to limit their mobile experience.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is no different. In November 2011, Samsung Electronics announced it had joined the Open Standard for Public Transport Alliance (OSPT) as a full member. The formation of the alliance, coupled with the support and growth in membership numbers from players throughout for the mobile industry, has truly demonstrated how our ecosystem is ready to push forward with a commitment to enable the user to adopt NFC throughout their daily lives, across multiple applications without the worry of interoperability issues.

The payment application of NFC has long been hailed as the key enabler for mass market adoption. Despite this, the industry and the consumer are still waiting for the technology to really leave its mark in a tangible form. If we listen to the latest discussion surrounding NFC implementation, it’s encouraging to see that the industry now understands that mobile payment alone will not achieve the user convenience, which is essential for NFC adoption. Users want to engage with other applications in addition to the payment option that ultimately make their lives easier.

So with groups such as the OSPT, we see that the momentum is gathering in alternative sectors, and now within the transportation market, Samsung is playing its part to lead the development of commercialized semiconductor products for building next-generation transit fare collection systems based on the CIPURSE™ open security standard.

The CIPURSE open security standard addresses the need by transit authorities for future-proof fare collection systems with more advanced security than currently in use. Because it is an open standard, CIPURSE promotes vendor neutrality, cross-vendor system interoperability, lower technology adoption risks, higher quality and improved market responsiveness, all of which result in lower operating costs and greater flexibility for transport system operators. CIPURSE also offers a global basis for a faster transition of transit fare systems to the use of emerging NFC mobile phones and other devices and support for the adoption of NFC transit applications for a truly future-proof solution.

A key philosophy for any organisation is to provide flexible products and give customers the best solution in order to achieve their aims, whilst introducing new features within a short period of time. For that reason, we believe NFC Chip and secure element devices should be based on flash technology. When it comes to transportation, the industry is already in a position to use existing solutions to implement the OSPT scheme.

The OSPT has worked tirelessly to educate the market on the importance of open standards, but more support is needed in order to build on the current momentum and push the message of interoperability to the wider audience. However, progress is being made, with a recent ‘Future of ticketing’ report by the Greater London Authority stating: “Any new ticketing system should, as far as possible, be compatible with those provided by other transport operators”, this endorsement of the open approach speaks volumes of what has been achieved to date, however we believe this is only the beginning.