February 21, 2008—Timo Lindström is CEO of Confidex, based in Tampere, Finland. With ten years of RFID savvy, in 2006 they began manufacturing in China.

What work is Confidex doing in the “contactless ticket” market?

Confidex is manufacturing contactless tickets made of paper and plastic. We produce approximately one million tickets each week.

In what areas of the world is the use of these tickets strongest now? Do you see any international trends?

Europe and Asia, especially China, are leading adopters. In those countries all new metro systems are based on contactless technology. The international trend is now that also limited use tickets – those tickets used for single trips, weekly tickets, tourist tickets, that sort of thing – are going contactless; not only the contactless smart cards for frequent travelers.

Have you seen cultural barriers to adoption anywhere? In what ways?

North America has been slower in adopting contactless technology. In Asia, transit schemes are often simple, mainly single trips, not prepaid multi-trip tickets or annual cards.

Other than mass transit, how else do you see contactless tickets being used, now or soon?

Event ticketing, especially sports stadiums, are adopting contactless. All football stadiums in Germany are contactless; the Beijing Olympics tickets will be contactless. Access control to buildings is almost always contactless, now, when new systems are installed.

Confidex refers to these tickets as RFID, whereas some other contactless tickets are called NFC? Is this nomenclature or different functionality?

There are no NFC tickets as such. Contactless tickets and NFC devices, like mobile phones, are based on the same standard, ISO 14443. It means that the same reader infrastructure can read, in the future, both contactless tickets and NFC-enabled mobile phones.

We have seen many NFC proponents reluctant to use the initials RFID, whereas NFC is a technology with a unique ID transferred over radio waves, in effect the definition of RFID. We believe NFC is RFID. What are your views?

As I was describing, NFC is based on ISO 14443-standard, which is an RFID standard.

The basic difference is partly explain in the abbreviations: Near Field Communication, which means that devices communicate with each other when they are “near’ each other, and Radio Frequency Identification, where the goods and people are identified. We will see convergence of these two technologies in mass transit in the future, still years from now.

We expect that NFC-enabled phones will come to the market and many frequent travelers will use them for transit payment. However, we do not expect NFC phones to replace the need for limited use tickets.