NFC Calling

In Seoul, Korea, Philips is working with South Korean mobile telecommunications firm SK Telecom to launch a technology trial in which NFC phones will be used to download content, unlock doors and pay for goods. And in the United States, fans of the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team can use Nokia NFC phones at Philips Arena to download pictures of their favorite players or the players' favorite ring tones, as well as to make purchases in the stadium. The trial is sponsored by Nokia, Chase Bank, Cingular Wireless and contactless application provider ViVOtech.

In the future, NFC will be used to link two or more devices so that they can send data back and forth—for example, two NFC phones could swap address book entries or music files. The NFC protocol does not allow for high bandwidth and fast data transmissions, so it's considered complementary to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technology, which can transmit large amounts of data over RF quickly.


"I find NFC very compelling," says David Chamberlain, the principal analyst covering wireless technology for market research firm http://www.instat.com/ In-Stat>. "I really like the possibilities." But he says the technology companies need to adhere to the emerging NFC protocol standards in order for NFC to be successfully adopted, especially in the United States, where companies tend to compete by using different protocols, rather than rally around common ones.

Europe is currently the leader in NFC adoption, because of the availability of NFC phones. Nokia, Samsung and Motorola have added NFC capability only to those phones that use a standard called Global System for Mobile communication (GSM), which dominates the cell phone market in Europe. In the United States, many mobile telecoms only support phones that use the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standards developed by Qualcomm. In Asia, both GSM and CDMA phones are widely used. Manufacturers are reportedly developing NFC-enabled CDMA phones.

The emergence of NFC standards is likely to entice more chipmakers to build NFC chipsets, and more phone manufacturers to add the technology to handsets. Today, Philips is the largest provider of the chipset that acts as the brain of the NFC module. But French firm INSIDE Contactless and British company Innovision are also developing NFC chipsets.

ABI Research predicts that more than 50 percent of all mobile phones worldwide will carry NFC technology by the year 2010.