Mifare is what’s been used in London’s Oyster cards for 20 years (not the ultralight ones mind), and Hong Kong for even longer.
However oyster really is in its way out for most uses. contactless and especially a phone is far more convenient for non season use, and far less wasteful.
Isn't Mifare in different forms a de-facto standard for NFC subway tickets around the world? St Petersburg uses Mifare Classic (and tokens), Moscow also uses Mifare Classic for the refillable Troika card and Mifare Ultralight for disposable ones, Dubai "nol" card is a Mifare Desfire, Los Angeles "tap" card is a Mifare Classic, and, yes, the London Oyster is a Mifare Desfire EV1. Yes I actually went through my stack of transit cards and scanned those of them that I wasn't sure about.
The only ones that I came across that are not Mifare, and not even readable by Android (but readable by the Flipper Zero), are the paper tickets used in Brussels. Then, of course, there are non-NFC tickets. For example those that use magnetic stripes, like the cute tiny ones in Paris or NYC's MetroCard.
There are two distinct types of Oyster card, but I don't know which is which, other than from a user perspective. All I know is that I had an old style one (the one without the white D in a blue square on the back) and you could still use it, you just couldn't "connect it" to the app so you couldn't look up your travel history.
There was a complicated process for returning it and getting a replacement, but as they'd already phased in paying by bank card by then, and the only advantage of an oyster card was for season tickets, I just returned it and got my deposit back.
But if you're into collecting different card types, you might want to try to get hold of one of these old ones as well. They're probably somewhat rare now, as they were encouraging people to upgrade to the new ones at least 5 years ago.
Japan uses FeliCa for its integrated transport cards (I just read an Osaka Metro ICOCA card with NFC Tools to check). This is used by quite a few systems around the world, including Hong Kong's Octopus.
That's a lot more MIFARE Classic than I would have expected considering that reader support for those is a lot less guaranteed these days. I guess a lot of them might be legacy systems.
Hong Kong's Octopus card uses Felica, as far as I know.
It's conceptually very similar to MIFARE – a fixed function IC implementing a fully offline stored value purse – but uses a stack that differs from ISO 14443 A on pretty much all layers. (It was planned to possibly become ISO 14443 C, but that never happened.)
>Hong Kong's Octopus card uses Felica, as far as I know.
Yes: Felica was developed by Sony in Japan, but was actually first adopted in Hong Kong, then later in Japan. It's far better than other standards, because it's so fast.
There's a noticeable delay between contactless cards and oysters. Some people I know prefer oyster cards simply because they open the gates faster, in spite of having to top them off all the time.
I'm looking forward to not having to choose one trade-off over the other.
The MIFARE protocol (which Oyster cards use) takes 300ms to 500ms per tap. EMV (i.e. contactless cards) take ~500ms, which slows down normal walking speed.
It’s noticeable if you’re used to the instant response of Oyster, but we’re talking about a few hundred extra milliseconds. Not something that bothers you once you’re accustomed to it.
It’s still fast enough that it will read my Apple Watch before the gate starts to close from the passenger in front of me.
One saved trip to an Oyster top-up machine will make up for a lifetime of contactless NFC latency!
>but we’re talking about a few hundred extra milliseconds. Not something that bothers you once you’re accustomed to it.
Wrong. With the traffic volumes normally seen in Tokyo, those few hundred extra milliseconds will cause huge delays at the fare gates. There's a reason the systems here use the Felica card which processes in 100ms: it's really needed for this kind of pedestrian volume.
At peak hours it can definitely be a problem, you really need the entire pipeline to work well. There's going to be somebody behind you most of the time, and you really don't want people stuck at the gates.
In Japan credit card transactions routinely take a couple seconds. Imagine each person taking 5 seconds to go through the gate! I think what trials for credit card payments in transportation services there are doing is simply not processing the transaction inline, and just doing it after the fact (assuming it will go through).
Yes, the TfL system does a partial authorisation. It checks the card is valid and not blocked etc but doesn’t necessarily do a real-time authorisation all the way to the issuing bank.
If you try to use a card that is valid but has no available balance/credit, it might work for the first ride but then be blocked when you try to use it for the return trip.
Fares are batched throughout the day and you are charged once, overnight, for all rides that day (after applying any multi-ride discounts, etc).
This is different from some other cities where I’ve used contactless payments and they’d charge you immediately for each ride, giving you lots of annoying little charges on your bank statement!
Wonder how they block the card, my impression was that tokenization was meant to make it harder for card chargers to be able to track a card through multiple taps like that.
TfL not only gets your Apple Pay device account number (DAN), but can also associate it with the primary card number (PAN). Both magically appear if you add the primary card to your online TfL account and have used the associated Apple Pay device with TfL before.
> ”Is it not possible to top up a digital Oyster card on an iPhone or Apple Watch via an app or Apple Wallet?”
It is, there’s even an auto top-up option that adds credit automatically if your balance drops below a certain level.
But there’s no “digital” Oyster card, only physical ones. If you want to use a device to pay you have to use contactless.
And either way, it’s still kind of a pain to have to maintain a balance - especially if you’re a tourist or visitor and don’t know exactly how much credit you’re going to need.
I agree that being able to load a transit card into Apple Pay etc is also a good solution. The convenience of not having a physical card that can be easily lost or forgotten is probably the biggest benefit for me.
costco already has this for ID cards in the states (and I've also seen it for account ID for home depot and some other places where it's tied to discounts). the app will pull up an ID card with a QR code that changes every 60 seconds or so to prevent screenshotting and trivial reuse, which is analogous to the function the chip performs in terms of challenge-authentication.
I think there are plans for contactless smartphone tickets in Montreal too. I wonder why they haven't done that yet, it's been years since they've started talking about it.
However oyster really is in its way out for most uses. contactless and especially a phone is far more convenient for non season use, and far less wasteful.