NFC: if you are in a hole, stop digging

Alex Leslie - 18/01/12

We are in a rut. We see ‘NFC’; we think mobile payments. We see statistics illustrating the huge scale of the investment being made in NFC. We look at ISIS and other consortia trialing and testing and further investing. Then we wonder why every big player is hedging its bets. From Visa to Google, from PayPal to Verizon there are a host of others initiatives going on in the mobile payments space.

So when I say how near is NFC I do not mean either ‘it is here now, look: 80 million handsets this year alone!’ or ’80 million handsets will not even cause a ripple in the ocean of handsets shipped this year, NFC is dead!’

What I mean is you have to very close to something to communicate with it using NFC. Bluetooth, the low powered version, allows communication within 10 metres, the high powered version a 100 metres.

NFC works at 10 centimetres. You have to be close enough to ‘tap’.

So, you could not put your phone on the conference table and swop business cards with the whole table, you would have to walk round the table, tapping away. You could tap a poster and get all sorts of information about the latest movie or event or book – as long as the poster was not the other side of the railway tracks.

Whether the gap is 10 metres or 10 centimetres, it is still a gap. As Dale Youngs of Subex said in a recent interview, “with an air gap, there are no records, just air,” and NFC is not secure, not by a long shot.

Cynicism aside – well almost – there are a huge number of applications that wind-swept marketing folk are coming up with while waiting for the payment terminals to somehow arrive in all major retail outlets and NFC chips to be ubiquitous. Airline or hotel check in could well be an application, paying for taxis or trains is another, personalized, ‘pull’ type advertising is right there.

But NFC as the catalyst for ubiquitous mobile payments? No, not for me. No Financial Conclusions (NFC) yet I am afraid.

So, will NFC become the embedded communications ‘thing’ at the heart of the mobile world? Absolutely. Let NFC disappear into the infrastructure of our wireless world, let the security guys secure it and let other industries innovate. After all they see the need for close up communications, close up.