The key to NFC deployment: Sagem Orga and Telenor develop a new bridge between the NFC infrastructure and the SIM card in a mobile phone

Barcelona, Mobile World Congress 2010

By equipping a key fob with a Near Field Communication capability and using it in combination with a wireless-enabled SIM card in a mobile phone, contactless technology becomes easy to deploy, since this scenario is supported by 100% of all existing and future mobile phones.
Sagem Orga (Safran group), Telenor Group and ST Microelectronics are demonstrating this in live demos at the Mobile World Congress with a sample solution for Calypso* electronic ticketing in public transportation and for mobile payment.

Use cases for NFC are numerous, but until today there has been a gap: The infrastructure is there, but no NFC-enabled phones. The industry has been looking for ways of bridging this gap. Previous bridge solutions have drawbacks such as missing network connections or user interactivity, and none of the existing solutions leverages the SIM card in the mobile phone with all its capabilities. The new solution by Sagem Orga and partners overcomes these disadvantages. Mobile network operators will be able to fully manage and control NFC applications thanks to the SIM card.

For the demo solution, a key fob has been equipped with a Sagem Orga NFC-enabled SIM card connected by Single Wire Protocol to the ST21NFCA chip from ST Microelectronics to enable the contactless feature. This NFC key fob is connected to the SIM in the mobile phone using the new WLAN SIM "ConnectSIM" developed by Sagem Orga and Telenor. This solution forms the bridge between NFC technology and the SIM card in any kind of mobile phone.

Any NFC application, such as mobile payment or Calypso for transportation, can be installed on the SIM card of the mobile phone and/or the NFC key fob using any traditional or Over The Air mechanism. It can be executed in both devices or only in one of them, depending on the required performance, resources and connectivity.

For example, a terminal for contactless banking can trigger the mobile payment application stored in the key fob to start a transaction. Next the key fob starts a remote SIM toolkit execution on the SIM inserted in the mobile phone to enable interaction with the user - asking for a password, displaying a message, or logging information to the network, for example.

With the same key fob solution, the user can also start a SIM Toolkit application on the mobile phone to order new transportation e-tickets; the Calypso vending server then uses the normal OTA infrastructure to send the tickets securely to the SIM and on to the key fob.

The WLAN communication channel between the SIM in the handset and the secure element in the key fob is highly secured and can be protected by a PKI mechanism if needed.

Didier Sérodon, Chief Technology Officer at Sagem Orga: "The NFC key fob in combination with the WLAN SIM brings more convenience and security to contactless technology. We are demonstrating the advantages of a constant connection between the SIM in the mobile phone and the secure element in the accessory via a wireless link with examples from the transportation and the mobile payment area, but this can also pave the way for all classic NFC use cases such as access control, loyalty, etc. All of them can be managed by the NFC key fob."

Yogesh Malik, Senior Vice President at Telenor Group Business Development and Research, commented: "We believe that this innovative wireless bridge between NFC and the SIM card can give operators greater flexibility in the launch of NFC services. We hope to see this technology refined further through tests and trials so that it can become a user-friendly commercial product for services in ticketing, payment and access control."