Mobile NFC transport ticketing era dawns in Italy

Italy’s first public transport ticketing
service using contactless payments technology incorporated in
mobile phones is to be launched by Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), the
mobile carrier unit of the country’s largest telecommunications
company Telecom Italia. For the service TIM has selected
Netherlands electronic payments technology developer Gemalto to
supply SIM cards with embedded near field communications (NFC)
transport applications.

The service is to be introduced in Trento, a
northern Italian city with a population of about 110,000 and
represents the first move towards mobile contactless deployment
throughout Italy. Among service features, users will be able to
purchase tickets from anywhere at anytime via their mobile phone
and validate their transport pass even when the battery of their
mobile phone is off.

With the Italian project Gemalto builds on a
solid record in the transport sector which includes extensive NFC
ticketing deployments in France in conjunction with French mobile
carriers. The first was in 2005 in collaboration with mobile
carrier Bouygues Telecom and Paris’ public transport utility Régie
Autonome des Transports Parisiens. In 2006 a NFC ticketing project
was undertaken in Grenoble, again in collaboration with Bouygues
Telecom. In 2007 Gemalto worked with mobile carrier NRJ Mobile to
deploy a NFC ticketing service in Strasbourg. The same year Gemalto
partnered with mobile carriers Orange and SFR, France’s national
railway operator SNCF and private transport company Keolis to
provide the Rennes region with a multi-modal set of contactless
services covering bus, trams, trains and parking ticketing and
smart posters.

Experience throughout the world has shown that
users rapidly adopt contactless payments transport infrastructure
technology and enjoy the strong benefits that it offers, commented
Philippe Vallée, executive vice-president (telecommunications) at
Gemalto. “That is why we forecast that transportation applications
will be essential to the take-off of NFC services on mobile
phones,” he added.

In addition to mobile phone based NFC ticketing
Gemalto has built a formidable record in the deployment of
contactless cards for public transport use over the past decade. In
total Gemalto has supplied more than 100 million contactless cards
to public transport operators in 10 countries.