Short-range wireless makes first big step

An industry group has released an architecture and initial specifications for a wireless technology with a range of inches that can be used to automate data sharing and transactions by mobile devices.

The work from the Near Field Communications (NFC) Forum is the group's first step toward crafting a set of protocols that eventually will let smart phones with NFC chips quickly launch a range of applications to track items, collect data, read text, link to Web resources and services and pay for purchases.

Forum members include financial giants like American Express and VISA, NFC start-ups like MobileLime, chipmakers like Intel, consumer electronics companies like Sony, and carriers like Sprint.

Although many forum vendors focus on consumer applications for NFC, such as a using a smart phone to buy a stadium ticket, one of the group's founders, Nokia, has been focusing on a range of enterprise applications.

Nokia last year introduced NFC capabilities on a trio of smart phones, along with some client code and a server application, called Nokia Field Force Services Manager.

Variants of NFC are already deployed in credit cards with embedded microchips and other tokens for making so-called contactless payments.

The idea driving the NFC Forum is intuitively simple: bring or touch together two devices (such as cell phones), and the NFC chips and software stacks automatically set up a peer-to-peer network, and let the devices exchange a range of data. The same devices will be able to collect data from any object with a matching RFID tag.

"Today, the mobile phone's main application is voice," says Gerhard Romen, a Nokia executive who also chairs the NFC Forum's marketing committee. "But imagine what you actually have in your hands: a processor of a couple of hundred megahertz, an operating system, it can run Java, Internet connectivity, a user interface with a screen and keyboard. With NFC capabilities, you can make using the cell phone really simple in data applications."

The high frequency radio runs in the 13.56-MHz unlicensed ISM band, with a range of just 4 to 8 inches. The Physical Layer is defined mainly by the ISO 18092 standard based on several standards from the ISO and ECMA standards bodies. It supports a range of existing smart card protocols, such as Sony's FeliCa and Philips' Mifare protocols.

Forum members and others see NFC fitting into other radio technologies, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and other RFID implementations. NFC has neither the range, nor the throughput (at just 212Kbps maximum) to act as a heavyweight data transport, according to Erik Michielsen, director of RFID and Machine-to-Machine studies at ABI Research.

But making NFC chips a standard feature on smart phones, NFC-enabled applications can collect data and launch transactions that then make use of other wireless transports. "It's just easier than Bluetooth [for example]: you just touch and enable," Michielsen says.

A November 2005 study by Venture Development, Natick, Mass., notes that the spread of the cell phone, and the growth of cellular data services, has created a "new de facto wireless communications infrastructure." With this framework, NFC-enabled cell phones will make it possible to bring e-commerce into the wireless space. As Nokia's Field Services Manager product shows, the same holds true for a range of enterprise data collection and transaction applications.