France to trial 4GB USB train tickets

Davey Winder
Friday, 05 September 2008 15:41

Your IT - Home IT

French train travellers will soon be able to top up their train travel passes at home using a PC courtesy of the first RFID-based smart ticket complete with USB compatibility...

SNCF is the National Railway of France, famous for its high speed trains which travel across Europe. Like all public transport operators these days, it has been turning to smartcard ticketing to make things more efficient.

While some operators such as Transport for London are in the news for scrapping smart tickets which have proven to be quite dumb of late, SNCF is taking ticketing to another level.

It is set to start trialling a RFID-enabled, web-ready smart-ticket that comes on a 4GB USB stick.

The Weneo 1000 RFID device looks pretty much like any other USB memory stick, but looks can be deceptive.

For a start, not too many thumb-drives come with contactless data transfer courtesy of the built-in RFID compliance. Not many have a secure photo-ID capsule as part of the design either, for that matter.

Marseille based Neowave will be supplying the Weneo 1000 to SNCF as part of an initial test amongst 1000 volunteer passengers. SNCF already has a basic RFID smart ticket, but this one is even smarter thanks to the USB connection.

The idea being that passengers will be able to connect the train ticket to their PC at home or work, and top it up as necessary and at their convenience.

Although the Weneo supports Apple, Linux and Windows operating systems there is no confirmation as yet if the SNCF ticketing trial will be cross-platform or, as you have to kind of expect, restricted to Windows users only.

The interesting part is the storage capapcity of the ticket, a whopping 4GB. Way too much for a simple contactless payment card. So what is the extra capacity going to be used for?

It would appear that alongside the obvious cardholder name and payment balance stuff, data to be stored will include information relating to whether the holder is a student or senior, and possibly transit timetables as well.

There is an obvious opportunity for privacy campaigners to go on the attack here, but there is no evidence that any route tracking will take place or other personal data held.

Indeed, it seems that SNCF and the Weneo have the security and privacy stuff all figured out. The personal data is stored on one part of the USB device, while a second chip with just an ID number operates independently to perform the prepaid balanced deduction at the turnstile.