In the telecommunications industry, Near Field Communication (NFC) is becoming more and more important. Mobile carriers and handset manufacturers are starting to realize that NFC is one of the keys to a smart life. So in the future, this will be one of the technologies that is needed to enjoy all the benefits that Smart Cities will offer.
NFC is a kind of Radio-frequency identification (RFID). This stands for a wireless communication using tiny computer chips and radio frequency. The idea behind it is that you don’t need a communication network, you just need to hold the object which has a RFID tag on it close to a RFID reader. One of the most important aspects about NFC is that it enabled bidirectional communication. It can do more than just store and send information to the reader.
Kim Jong-dae, researcher at the LG Economic Research Institute said that NFC only works within a radius of 10 centimeters. But he calls this a good thing. If NFC was only used for communication, this 10 centimeter radius would be a bad thing, but since it’s combined with the use of 3G, Wi-Fi and other high-speed communication methods, this radius doesn’t really matter.
And in the matter of privacy, it’s a good thing that you have to be at a distance of 10 centimeters to enter the device. This makes hacking not possible. Since you don’t have to enter a password or a username to use NFC devices but you just have to put your smartphone for example close to it, the radius of 10 centimeters is kind of a safety boundary.
Sony and semiconductor company NXP first developed the NFC technology in 2002. But because this was an expensive chip and there weren’t lot of infrastructures to use this on, there was a lack of attention. But now the conditions to use NFC have become more favorable. The price has come down a lot and smartphones with a NFC chipset on it have become widely and globally available.
Although only about 3 per cent of cell phones have a NFC ship now, it’s expected that this number will grow a lot in the future. This rise can be seen in Google supporting NFC now from their operating system Android and manufacturers like LG and Samsung announced that they will be uploading NFC to most of their smartphones. Also Nokia and RIM are planning to put NFC in their phones and Apple wants to include it in their iPhone 5. Since it’s expected that NFC will become important for the creation of Smart Cities, a lot of governments are leading the standardization of this technology.
An application of NFC is that it can turn smartphones into credit cards. You can just hold your smartphone close to a payment device to pay for your items. And this is just one of the many services that are based on NFC. It can be used for buying things from shopping channels on TV. By touching the smart TC with the NFC smartphone, you buy the product instantly.
So smartphones with NFC enable communication with a lot of other devices. You could buy tickets, receive information, very the user on a computer, start your car, it can be used for exchanging business information instead of exchanging business cards and so on. This technology will make a lot of these things possible in the future.
Real Time Cities 