Tube to launch phone-swipe Oyster scheme

London Underground is ready to establish a system which lets people to pay for railroad train journeyings using their mobile phones. Officials from Conveyance for London, mobile shaper Nokia and telephone web O2 are understood to be preparing concluding inside information of a French telephone with a built-in Oyster card.

It is believed that the strategy will let tubing travelers to pay for their journeyings simply by swiping a compatible mobile telephone across the ticket-reading machine. The system could also be used for autobus journeys, tramways and some overland railroad train journeyings around the capital.

The launch would tag a important enlargement of the Oyster card strategy already used by Greater London Underground, which lets travelers to pay for all their journeyings using a single swipe card.

That undertaking have recently been expanded to integrate new engineerings such as as the Visa PayWave card, which compounds a recognition card, Oyster card and "contactless" payment system which can be used to authorise little purchases at some retailers.

Nokia's contactless system is likely to utilize a micro chip inside the phone, which activates whenever it is passed over an Oyster card reader. The terms of the journeying would be deducted from a top-up account or added to the traveller's monthly telephone bill. The strategy could pave the manner for Mobiles to be used as payment on other word forms of conveyance elsewhere in Britain.

Some states have got been using radiocommunication frequence designation - the engineering behind the Oyster system - for some years. Chips are embedded in about 50% of all telephones sold in Japan.