SIMalliance said it has formed a new working group to promote near-field communications (NFC) with a phone’s SIM card as the central technology.
The group does not plan to establish industry standards and will have a marketing slant, not a technical slant, Alliance spokesman Stephanie de Labriolle said.
Short-term deliverables include a white paper to be published by the end of this year. Also, a formal partnership program will be established, de Labriolle added.
By having the SIM card as the centrepiece of an NFC handset, “the SIM keeps the [carrier] in the value chain. The SIM is a tamper-resistant module that from the beginning was designed with security in mind. In other words, it's a business model issue, if the mobile operators want to stay in the loop, there is a good chance that the will SIM play a pivotal role,” she said.
Jonathan Main, technical chairman of the NFC Forum, said putting NFC technology into SIM cards makes sense for many applications – but not for all applications.
“From the NFC Forum view, there are a number of different options for implementation of applications. Putting applications in the SIM is one option, which is entirely valid for certain markets, [but] there are people who see a separate chip as the way to go,” he said.
“The NFC Forum as a whole doesn’t have a particular opinion on it,” Main added. Obviously phones using CDMA technology do not have SIM cards, he noted.
SIMalliance and the NFC Forum do not have an official partnership, but there are overlapping member companies.