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Gemalto NV and Inside Contactless, both based in France, later this year plan to start selling to mobile operators and handset makers chips and SIM cards that enable Near Field Communication transactions, a Gemalto spokesperson tells CardLine Global. The two companies have worked for "several years" on NFC technology, which enables contactless payments and ticketing and coupon and data downloads, the card vendor's spokesperson says. The newest offering includes Inside's MicroRead NFC chip and Gemalto's UpTeq 300 m-NFC SIM card. The technology meets various standards related to NFC, including the single wire protocol, which refers to the link between SIM cards and NFC chips inside mobile handsets, and other standards set by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The Gemalto spokesperson declined to estimate how many chips and SIM cards might ship by the end of the year but said deliveries should start in the second half of 2009. Though transit agencies, banks, mobile operators and others have launched dozens of NFC tests globally over the past few years, the technology has yet to see a large scale rollout, and industry observers and NFC backers regularly push the estimated dates back. Among the problems delaying rollouts are the lack of NFC-enabled handsets and deciding how to split the revenue for NFC schemes. Virtually no observers expect rollouts before 2010. "It's difficult to give an exact date for [rollouts], but the momentum is definitely there," the Gemalto spokesperson says.
