Contactless "Smart" Cards

You can fool all the people for some time. And you can fool some people all the time. But you cannot fool all the people all the time!(Abraham Lincoln, US. president 1861-1865)

he Interface between the beam traffic system and its human users has to be as smooth as possible, and in tune with recent technological developments. There are a few automated fare payment systems to choose from. But "our" daily commuters would preferably use a contactless card valid for them personally, valid for a company where they work or of a general, temporary kind.

The temporary card, which could be bought just about anywhere, could be limited to either a specific time, a specific area or for a specific number of journeys (or a combination of these). This card should preferably be of a kind that does not have to be brought out when entering the car. Kept in the pocket; it could trigger the cardreader from a distance of between 0.1 and 1 meter.

The market for magnetic cards has been exploding! Many new systems have been popping up. How they will fare in competition with Bluetooth, as these units gets cheaper and more common, remains to be seen. Their fields of use are overlapping, but they still have a vastly different technology. Let us for the purpose of this page define our terminology: Magnetic Cards have a magnetic strip (usually on the back) containing information, such as expiry time or amount of money it is good for, etc. Smart Cards contain a microchip with a memory, whose content can be altered. A paycard could thus regularly be recharged with new money and then used as an electronic wallet. The more advanced of these cards will contain a micro processor, and the cards will be used for many purposes, beside representing money. These Smart Cards can be divided into 3 categories: Contact Cards are the kinds dominating at the present. They have to be moved past a reader. Contactless Cards need only to come into close proximity of the reader. Combi Cards could be used in both situations. Their main attraction is that one card could fill many purposes, such as credit card, bank card, membership card, ID-card, etc, all in the same card.

ontactless Cards are already being used around the world, usually in connection with travelling on public transport vehicles. The interior makeup of the card is more or less like the illustration in figure 4 above. This card is normally "asleep" but would be awakened by the car's transceiver whenever the card comes within the required distance. The car's sensors would be mounted on the inside, since the car would not be interrested in people milling about in the neighborhood walking to or from other cars. This also means that the beam car's reader always can check which cards are in the car. With antennas built into the walls and ceilings, they could monitor the whole car (no place to hide for the card-bearer!). A card that does not have to be produced from the pocket or wallet has obvious advantages for the traveler who might be laden with parcels or kids. From July 1996, all 8 700 buses of Seoul, South Korea, are equipped with readers for contactless cards, and 1.8 million cards have been sold. London, Paris and Hongkong are cities that are expected to follow. The maximum reading distance for the buses in Seoul has been set to 10 centimeters, to avoid unintentional charging of people who don't intend to travel. The system in Seoul uses a 13.56 MHZ carrier wave. The card itself needs some kind of energy source. There are 3 solutions to this: The card is normally kept in a container, which has both battery and antenna (clumsy solution!). The card will have a small battery, not thicker than the card (these batteries don't exist yet). The card gets its' energy from the magnetic field surrounding the card reader's antenna. About 7 million of these cards were sold worldwide in 1995. For the year 2000 there will be an estimated 200 million of these cards in use; a truly exploding market! And with that kind of production, the price difference compared to ordinary Smart Cards will be neglibible! The personal card for travel on the beam network could have destination and other kinds of information already programmed into it, if the destination is the same most days. Or else, the cardreader in the car would monitor where and when the traveler enters or leaves. The traveler could also tell a booking terminal where he/she is headed and give information about required travel route and stops along the way, if any. These instructions would override the normal routing functions in the network. When a traveler orders or books a car ("booking" in this context means that the person also provides the desired time and destination when/where he wants to find his car), he/she will have to provide the id-number of the card. This id is saved by the system computer, and can then be "matched" with a renewd reading by the card reader when the traveler enters the car, thus ensuring that it is the booked person that occupies the beamcar. The job of the booking computer is to log this information, check the travelers account (if the charge for the trip is to be drawn from an account), and check with the central computer, which handles the administration of beamcars, whether there is a suitable vehicle available. As a final step, the booking computer provides this information to the traveler-to-be. With the help of this provided information, the customer can change or cancel his/hers reservation if the available options are not suitable.

For the curious Bluetooth is an up-and-coming communications standard for short-distance wireless connections. The work with development of Bluetooth was started by Ericsson Mobile Communication in 1994. In 1997, Ericsson started cooperating with Intel, and later on Nokia, IBM och Toshiba joined in the development effort. In 1998, these 5 companies formed the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). The aim of this group is to produce an open Bluetooth interface specification. The SIG-group has expanded considerably; as of this writing, it has 1667 members! Among these members are companies like 3Com, Compaq, Dell, Lucent, Motorola and Microsoft. The technique behind Bluetooth is a small radio transmitter/receiver, which need not be larger than a human fingernail, which enables wireless units such as a cell phones and computers to communicate and exchange information. The transmitter/receiver use the 2.45 GHz frequency band, which is freely available throughout the world (i.e. it is not as yet reserved for any specific purpose). The range is up to 10 meters. Using amplification, this range could be increased to about 100 meters. One of the units will be assigned the role of "master". In this role, it can communicate with up to 7 other units, designated as "slaves", in what is termed a "pico-network". The bandwidth is about 1 Megabit/second. The traveler will thus carry one such unit in the form of a contactless smart card in his pocket or briefcase. Here is one scenario: When he/she arrives (on foot) at a beamcar stop, he will activate his card, and the card will transmit its identity. The stop will have one or more terminals, each consisting of a monitor screen and a keyboard. All terminals that are within range and are not occupied will then react by retracting the steel shield protecting the monitor & keyboard. The traveler then steps up to one of these and pushes relevant buttons to indicate what he wants. At the first push of a button, all the other free terminals close their visor again. This should also be the action of all terminals if no button is pressed within, say, 30 seconds. When a suitable vehicle arrives, the same card could be used to open the doors and also close them again, once the traveler is inside. This the card could do while remaining in the traveler´s pocket or briefcase. When calling attention to a terminal, the card could act as master. When the beamcar arrives, the beamcar computer will act as master and check for active cards in its vicinity. It would check their identity and make the decision to open the doors or not. The beamcar-unit could activate a display on the beamcar, with textual information for the traveler, so that he is not left in the dark as to what happens around him. Naturally, he should also be able to consult the station terminals for complementary information, if he feels stranded or bewildered. In short, the Bluetooth communications standard could be the ideal interface for humans, wanting to use the beamcar system. You can read more about how the Beamsystem could use Bluetooth. Bluetooth adapters for pc-computers and cell phones are already available on the market, although the Bluetooth-standard for communication is not finalized yet. By the year 2002 they will be widely spread.

Cyberphone his is a rather recent invention by the Swede Anders Rundgren. The idea is to have an enhanced mobile phone that has the intelligence to fill the function of ID-card, creditcard, driver´s license, etc. The phone has a small display and a keyboard, and can be connected to various places, such as banks, stores, etc. over the Internet.

Services of various kinds could be added to the person using the phone, over the Internet directly into cyberphone´s memory. For the purpose of travelling on the beam network, a money account with a bank could be accessed by the beamcar terminals during their communication with the mobile phone. This would be done automatically, as soon as the owner enables this service by pressing the right buttons in connection with entering the beamcar he intends to travel with.