East Japan Railway Co. during the first half of next year plans to offer a mobile fare-payment service for its network supported by mobile network carrier KDDI Corp.
The IS03 Android smart phone made by Sharp Corp. and based on Sony Corp.’s FeliCa contactless-payment technology would be the first phone to support the service. The transit agency hopes eventually to enable different smart phones carried by other network carriers, a spokesperson for Japan's largest passenger railway operator tells PaymentsSource.
JR East plans to base the service on Mobile Suica, a mobile-payment technology widely used in Japan. Consumers use the FeliCa chip-embedded phones to tap the Suica sensor to pay.
“We want to improve our service to satisfy our customers who have been increasingly demanding such services targeting smart phones,” the spokesperson says.
The service would cover all stations operated by JR East, as the operator commonly is known, that accept Suica contact transit cards, she says, declining to disclose the total investment the operator has made in the equipment needed to support contactless mobile payments.
Introduced in January 2006, Mobile Suica now has 2.18 million users across Japan, according to JR East.
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