French Telcos And Transit Operators To Work Together On NFC Ticketing

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France’s three major mobile network operators and its major mass transit companies have joined to create an interoperable ticketing application subscribers could download to NFC handsets and use in cities throughout France and beyond, Card Technology has learned.

Executives from the operators and transit companies met today to officially form the working group. It will include representatives from mobile operators Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, along with Paris Métro operator RATP, ’s national railway SNCF, and private transit companies Keolis, Veolia Transport and Transdev, sources tell Card Technology.

Representatives from the participating organizations began discussions in December and will likely announce the formation of the group next week. The group will work on the interoperable ticketing application and service for at least the next several months, according to sources. But a launch of such a service would be at least a couple of years off, they say.

The group will be based in Caen, in Normandy, a research and development hub for Orange ’s parent France Télécom and also the site of a project announced in November by the three major French mobile telcos, as well as major French banks BNP Paribas and Groupe Crédit Mutuel-CIC, to develop an interoperable payment application for NFC phones. Visa International and MasterCard Worldwide are also involved in that project, along with Pôle de Compétitivité Transactions Electroniques Sécurisées, an organization that brings together “clusters” of public, private and university representatives to develop secure electronic transaction products and services. It was unclear whether this organization will be involved in the transit-ticketing project.

The telcos and transit companies will base the contactless ticketing service on the Calypso application standard, now used on more than 20 million contactless cards and 130,000 terminals in more than 80 cities worldwide. A number of French cities, including Paris, Lyon, Nice and Bordeaux, use the standard, but it’s also gotten play elsewhere in Europe and in a few cities in North and South America . Calypso itself is based on the type B option of the main international standard for contactless chips, ISO 14443.

None of the Calypso-based cards or terminals in use are interoperable at present. At least one source says that although they all follow the Calypso technical standard, cards from one city couldn’t talk to most readers in other cities. Moreover, transit operators in the various cities within France and in the others that support the Calypso card standard–including Brussels, Lisbon, Florence, Montreal and Monterrey, Mexico–have no commercial agreements for clearing and settlement of transactions.

“The idea would be to make this (mobile Calypso) compatible with all these readers and to achieve what transport operators cannot achieve–interoperability,” says a source, who asked not to be identified.

While details of the project have yet to be made public, Card Technology has learned the vision is to allow subscribers to download the Calypso application to the SIM cards in their NFC phones and later securely download keys for the particular transit company or authority with which they want to ride. This, in effect, would personalize the Calypso application for the city the subscriber is visiting. They could then buy and download tickets for that transit company using their bank or credit accounts, or they could insert cash into ticket machines after arriving in the host city. In the latter case, the ticket, perhaps, could be downloaded to the phone from the machine via NFC, suggests another source. With the tickets, the subscribers would tap their phones to board metro trains, buses, trams or other modes of transport

NFC, or Near Field Communication, is a short-range wireless technology allowing devices, such as mobile phones, to communicate with each other and to emulate contactless cards.

For example, a subscriber of Orange who lives in Paris and uses his phone to cover his fares on the Paris Métro, could download tickets to use the Lyon metro system when visiting that city, after personalizing his phone for the Lyon Métro application.

While this is technically possible today with Calypso-based cards, the infrastructure enabling riders to do this is not in place.

“Working with the mobile phone operators, they bring you the infrastructure,” says one source, who adds that, in theory at least, a subscriber could prepare his phone with tickets for the public transport network in the city he plans to visit the next day, even if that city is thousands of miles away.

“Before leaving, (the subscriber could) load the applications, load the tickets, and you will have it when you arrive the next morning,” he says.

This apparently could avoid an elaborate clearing and settlement system, since the subscriber would be able to pay the host transit network when he downloads the tickets, either via his bank or credit accounts or, later, with cash at a ticket machine once in the city he’s visiting.

Transit companies and mobile operators would have to figure how to share revenue, however. Mobile telcos of late have talked about earning revenue from NFC-based payment and ticketing by charging fees to banks and transit operators for downloading the applications and tickets over the cellular networks and renting space on the SIM cards.

Of course, most travelers don’t use public transport when they travel, but frequent travelers might find the interoperable NFC transit ticketing service attractive, say sources.

“Rather than downloading 10, 15, transport applications, they would have to download only one set of keys per region,” says a source.