Smartcard ticketing going Underground

The London Underground has begun rolling out a smartcard ticketing system in what is billed as Europe's first major showcase of contactless smartcard technology.

This month 80,000 of the cards were issued to staff of London Underground and Transport for London under the "Oyster" smartcard programme, a £1.2bn, 17-year project intended ultimately to replace current ticketing systems.

TranSys, a consortium of companies led by Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS), designed the system and has so far outfitted 6,000 buses and 255 Tube stations to use the cards.

The smartcards are manufactured by Giesecke & Devrient and SchlumbergerSema using MiFare chips from Philips Semiconductors.

London mayor Ken Livingstone said that the trial was aimed at ironing out any remaining bugs in the system ahead of introducing the smartcards to consumers beginning in the spring. The trial was originally set to begin in August.

"From next year, the travelling public can look forward to less queuing to buy tickets and faster movement through ticket gates and onto buses," he said in a statement. "This new technology will play an important part in modernising London's transport."

Smartcards have been introduced in areas as diverse as e-wallets, set-top boxes and public telephones, but have only caught on in a few niche areas. Philips said it sees London as a European testing ground for its MiFare chips, which are already being used in the public transportation systems of Moscow, Beijing, Seoul and Ankara, among others.

Philips said it has shipped 250 million MiFare units worldwide, and about two million to Giesecke & Devrient and SchlumbergerSema.

The MiFare chip includes 1KB of EEPROM memory storing travel details, and communicates with a device in the ticket gate via radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, meaning that passengers need only to pass the card near the access point instead of inserting it into a machine before going through the entry or exit gates. Philips said that a security algorithm built into the chip makes it more difficult to replicate than magnetic-stripe cards.

The chip is compliant with the international ISO 14443 standard for contactless smartcards, and in fact Philips claims that the new ticketing infrastructure in London is the largest ISO-compliant smart-card project of its kind in the world.

Commuters using Oyster cards will be able to store their season ticket information on the card, or be able to buy individual trips under a programme called PrePay. Monthly and annual season tickets will be introduced to the public first. The cards will ultimately work across London's transportation network, including trams, Docklands Light Railway, buses and the Tube

Matt Broersma writes for ZDNet UK