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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

The Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, or RATP, operates the large metro, bus and tram network in Paris and has been an early experimenter with NFC and contactless-mobile ticketing.

The transit operator held internal and public trials in 2006 and 2007 with mobile operators France Telecom-Orange and Bouygues Telecom, putting the contactless Navigo fare-collection application on SIM cards in NFC or NFC-like phones. Transit operators in Ile-de-France have issued Navigo cards since 2003.

Frustrated by the lack of NFC phones, RATP in 2009 began testing contactless stickers for mobile phones, including NFC stickers designed to communicate with the electronics of the handsets they were attached to via a Bluetooth connection in both the phone and sticker. That test was not entirely successful because of battery problems in a prototype sticker, says RATP. The vendor, France-based Twinlinx, has come out with a newer version. RATP has invested a significant amount of money in Twinlinx to further develop a workable sticker.

RATP is also working with payment-card companies Visa Europe and MasterCard Worldwide along with its acquiring bank, La Banque Postale, to accept contactless bank cards directly at the metro turnstile and onboard buses and trams. It hopes to conduct tests accepting Visa payWave and MasterCard PayPass in early 2010. Within three to five years it would like to enable direct payment of fares with all contactless bank cards, a move that would require upgrades of all RATP terminals and development with the payment-card schemes and its bank of a much larger back-end system to process the fare payment.

Banks could also put the payWave and PayPass applications on NFC phones. RATP sees value in the open-loop payment concept, especially to reduce its dependence on single-use tickets for the throngs of tourists and other occasional riders it must accommodate.