FeliCa
More info
- Creator
- Sony
- Type
- Contactless smart card technology
- Website
- sony.net
Sony's contactless smart card technology, designed so that an entire rush hour can pass through the ticket gates without slowing down.
Sony developed FeliCa from the late 1980s with one very specific requirement: a transaction in roughly a tenth of a second, so commuters could tap and keep walking. The first big deployment was Hong Kong's Octopus card in 1997, followed by JR East's Suica in Tokyo in 2001. The cards quickly became electronic purses for kiosks and vending machines, and in 2004 the technology moved into phones as Osaifu-Keitai.
It is standardised as NFC-F, a separate branch of NFC alongside the ISO 14443 cards that Europe and the card networks use. That kept it a Japanese peculiarity: Apple added FeliCa to the iPhone precisely so it could sell Apple Pay in Japan at all. The idiosyncratic solution often turned out to be faster than the global one.