Japan Mobile NFC Consortium adopts international NFC Forum standards

Japan Mobile NFC Consortium adopts international NFC Forum standards

NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank have created the “Japan Mobile NFC Consortium” which will help the three carriers coordinate and adopt an international NFC standard as set forward by the NFC Forum.

Japan was the first country to really embrace NFC in a big way. They chose the FeliCa protocol as the standard before the NFC Forum had put together the international technical documents of what was to become a ubiquitous set of standards for NFC. It is fair to say that Japan as a nation has the most advanced and contiguous NFC deployment and adoption on the face of the planet. However, as NFC gears up around the globe FeliCa isn’t the standard that has been chosen by most other nations. In fact, many NFC phones sold outside of Japan only have limited support for FeliCa. Everyone else is using the NFC type A and type B NFC tags and standards and now Japan has decided it makes sense to start converting to the same system everyone else is using.

Japan Mobile NFC Consortium seeks to join the rest of the NFC world rather than standing alone

Think of it like WIMAX versus LTE. Sprint got 4G to the United States way ahead of any competitors. However, everyone else chose the LTE standard for their networks and now Sprint is building out its own LTE network to match. Although the WIMAX / LTE situation, where one of the technologies has benefits over the other, there is actually nothing wrong with FeliCa other than the fact that all the innovations globally are happening around type A and type B tags. The net results of Japan using FeliCa is that Japanese people who travel abroad will not be able to use their Osaifu-Keitai (wallet phone). The same is true for visitors to Japan with NFC mobile wallets that will currently not work because of the different standard.

“The consortium intends to work with mobile industry groups in Japan, including service suppliers and handset manufacturers, to incorporate compatibility with the Type A and B standards in the Japanese mobile ecosystem.” The Japan Mobile NFC Consortium also plans to “Create an environment in Japan where service providers can offer efficient, low-cost NFC services based on common standards and rules adopted by the three mobile operators.”

It makes complete sense for Japan to join the rest of the world in NFC standards. It is great to see the three MNOs working together as the Japan Mobile NFC Consortium to make this shift happen, despite Japan’s major investment in FeliCa and considering that it is going to take time to change out NFC ICs and readers.