Add to del.icio.us    Digg this    Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!

Tweet Share on Twitter

December 26, 2011

In its role as official NFC (near-field communications) payment sponsor for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Visa has been promising the first contactless games. The concept is that neither athletes nor spectators will need to use cash anywhere on the Olympic site. Many credit card companies are betting that the London 2012 Olympics will give NFC technology a needed boost to promote the system, and rightly so. However, rather than wait around for other companies to bring NFC to the masses, Visa has decided to enter the mobile accessories market itself.

To achieve that, Visa is releasing its new iCart mobile app to European customers earlier this year. "We have the iCart. It's just a small casing just a couple of millimeters thicker at the bottom of an iPhone or a BlackBerry where the payment application sits," said Sandra Alzetta, head of Visa's mobile payment unit.

"And we're looking at putting the NFC payment application on the microSD chip and that will all be ready in time for the summer Olympics," she added.

Companies note that the beauty of the microSD system - a small memory card commonly found in digital cameras - is that the card can be inserted into most currently-available mobile handsets, independent of mobile phone network operator. That could prove to be a great business advantage, according to Guillermo Escofet, a wireless industry analyst with Informa, a market research firm.

"The reason why companies like Visa and MasterCard are pursuing this-- one is simply because it gets over the problem of a lack of handset choice. The other reason is that you don't have other players trying to crowd into the value chain, and everything is nicely controlled by Visa and the banks."

But, of course, not all phones have SD card slots - most notably, the iPhone - hence the new add-on case. Meanwhile, the new giants of the mobile phone market are also moving to secure their own slice of the NFC pie, including Google, which launched its NFC payments service in the United States, with a U.K. debut slated for early in 2012.

Intriguingly, Apple just published a patent in the U.S. for their own NFC system, which could bring the whole payments process and even mobile network selection under the control of the iPhone user.

There are also a number of plug-in devices – like the iZettle from Sweden, or the American company, Square - that convert a phone into a credit or debit card reader. The stakes are high in a market potentially worth many billions. But the winner isn't necessarily going to be the company with the best phone or payment system, however.

But in the end, NFC may not only transform the mobile market, but banking as well, and credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard already know that all too well.

"It simply comes down to who do you trust with your money?" said David Snow, an NFC expert at Juniper research. "An older generation would say 'the bank looks after my money carefully,' but a younger generation might say 'I have more affinity with Google or Facebook than I have with my bank.'"

In other mobile news

Here's a quick question for you-- if a certified first responder emergency worker gets interference on his GPS receiver and that this greatly interferes in his or her job at saving lives since the GPS radio is being drowned out by a nearby cell phone transmitter, should a cell phone user still deserve access to a much less critical service?

That's a very good question, but it’s also a question that should have been asked in 2001, when the Federal Communications Commission first licensed dual-mode communications next to GPS bands, just before millions of GPS receivers were built and sold across the United States and elsewhere.

This is in direct relation to the several news stories that Wireless Industry News has been covering for the past several months regarding a wireless service provider called LightSquared. The whole issue stems from the fact that LightSquared's mobile network causes severe interference to ctitical GPS services used today to locate vehicles, help commercial airline pilots land their planes in bad weather and other such mission-critical applications. And you can read many of them here:

1) LightSquared admits its network places GPS nav systems at risk

2) LightSquared is grilled by Congress over GPS interference issues

3) LightSquared says it has a solution to its GPS interference issues?

4) LightSquared steps up its offensive against the GPS industry

5) Sprint and LightSquared make a deal, share network spectrum

6) LightSquared has found another solution to its ill-designed network?

7) LightSquared becomes a MVNE, doesn't care about the interference it causes to GPS

8) Is FCC's Chairman Julius Genachowski in bed with LightSquared?

9) The GPS Coalition forces LightSquared to be on its best behavior

10) LightSquared in the news again, claims it has fixed GPS interference issues

11) LightSquared is rapidly running out of cash, files petition with the FCC

Those news stories will help you better comprehend the scope of the whole issue, and how critical it is to the public's overall safety. But now, according to a recent government report leaked to Bloomberg and then described in a very basic news release from the National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing, extensive testing of the proposed LightSquared cellular network “found no significant interference with cellular phones.”

A U.S. Commerce Department spokesman by the name of Bill Mosley was since contacted to determine whether this referred to cellphone voice communications, or the separate GPS function in many phones. Because if LightSquared doesn’t interfere with cellphone GPS chips, that would undermine a key argument of the GPS industry.

Manufacturers of the popular navigation devices such as Garmin and others say that it is technically and economically impossible to shield them fully from GPS interference on LightSquared’s neighboring frequencies. If that’s correct, how can cellphone manufacturers claim that they fixed the interference issue when in fact it would appear that they didn't?

Mosley declined to answer our question, so we tracked down an engineer with direct knowledge both of the government interference testing and the design of cellphone GPS chips to find out more. He confirmed that cellphone GPS chips were unaffected in the LightSquared tests.

“The radio technology using RF frequencies inside cellphones is very different,” he told us, speaking on condition of anonymity mainly because he doesn’t want to get dragged into the contentious fight between Phil Falcone’s LightSquared and practically everybody else in the wireless industry. "The GPS technology in a typical cellphone has to deal with interference from the cellphone itself, so there is more filtering.”

Cellular phones, he said, are inherently “more robust because they have to live in a small package with a transmitter.” There are good technical reasons why it will be hard for the GPS industry to shield its devices from signals on the “upper 10? of LightSquared’s 20 megaherz of wireless spectrum next to the GPS band, this engineer said.

Firstly, GPS receivers have to pick up extremely weak radio signals from satellites orbiting 12,000 miles up in the sky, and that requires receivers that pull in as broad a swath of spectrum as possible. Filters that screen out all emissions below a certain threshold are extremely expensive and complex, he said. Even the successful cellphone filters only shielded them against ground-based transmissions in the “lower 10,” leaving a 10-mhz buffer zone.

“Is it possible to put a filter in a cellphone to filter against the upper 10? That would be really, really difficult,” he said. That probably explains why LightSquared has all but conceded that it can’t light up its transmitters on the “upper 10.”

If this is true, it flies directly in the face of the FCC who authorized all that spectrum to help build an unlimited number of ground stations covering the entire 20-mhz swath of spectrum back in 2001.

Ultimately, this engineer said, “the GPS community has special needs.” The FCC rules require users of one slice of wireless spectrum to avoid interfering with another, and LightSquared spent millions of dollars on filters that prevent its radios from transmitting on GPS frequencies.

But now, with more than 300 million GPS receivers out there designed to listen to not only GPS frequencies but neighboring bands, there are critical issues on the ground that will likely prevent LightSquared from making full use of its FCC-licensed spectrum.

“The GPS band is special, but the rules aren’t special,” the engineer said. The argument comes down to public safety versus commercial rights, he added. So the key question here is, does the FCC find itself in a pickle today after it authorized the spectrum more than ten years ago?

It now appears that LightSquared could be running out of cash, and the company says it has filed a petition for a Declaratory Ruling with the FCC for confirmation of its right to continue to exist.

LightSquared was expecting a decision by the end of 2011, but confidence in its various plans has been shaken by the selective leaking of test results and ongoing claims that the GPS industry is too big to be put at risk, so now LightSquared is demanding that the FCC state unequivocally that GPS manufacturers have no right to protection, or restitution, from LightSquared's business model.

The issue is that weak GPS signals are right beside the frequencies that LightSquared uses for mobile telephones, and that is where the source of the GPS interference comes from. The FCC granted LightSquared a licence to use that wireless spectrum, including a change of use as the bands were previously reserved for satellite-phones only.

The issue is that some GPS equipment listens to that spectrum too broadly, and can thus pick up and be overwhelmed by the neighbouring signal from LightSquared's ill-designed network.

As the company's petition explains: "The commercial GPS industry has manufactured, and sold to unsuspecting consumers, unlicensed and poorly designed GPS receivers that listen for radio signals both in the RNSS GPS frequency band as well as across the adjacent MSS frequency band that is not intended for GPS use, and in which LightSquared is licensed".

LightSquared has already agreed to abandon its upper frequency (which is right next to the GPS bands) and has reduced the transmission power in the lower band as well as edging away to reduce leakage. It has also financed the development of GPS filters which it claims would allow any GPS equipment to coexist with the LightSquared network for a few dollars (once fitted).

Even without the filters, LightSquared says the other mitigations mean every mobile phone tested works fine, so it's only the very high-precision (or very cheaply made) GPS receivers which remain at issue.

The GPS industry wants the neighbouring bands kept clear forever, to protect a service which is too important to risk by filling nearby frequencies with telephony. But legally, that argument holds very little water, despite that it's persuasive reasoning.

There are millions of GPS devices being used daily, and while most of them won't need better filters, a significant number of them will.

The problem, for the FCC, is that LightSquared has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the venture, so the FCC is going to have to find a good reason to reject the claim or risk being sued for going back on the agreement.

And LightSquared needs to soon raise even more cash, but no one is going to invest in anything until the FCC makes a public decision, which is why this petition has been filed.

Add to del.icio.us    Digg this    Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!

Tweet Share on Twitter

Source: Visa International.

    This article was featured on Business 5.0 and on Tech Blog.