03-13-2018, 05:01 PM
(03-13-2018, 01:38 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: As KevinT provided in a great explanation, the fundamental payment technology is different. Oyster terminals also accept Visa cards, which means, so far as I understand, that every single payment terminal must have a continuous internet connection. Offline payments are not possible.
Not necessarily. Credit card companies are only too happy to wait for a vendor to clear transactions a day or more later. (An extreme example: you can still use a physical carbon-paper credit-card payment device these days. The ones that go "ka-chunk ka-chunk")
In fact, Transport for London's implementation wouldn't work without post-facto clearing. It requires you to use your credit card at tap-in -and- tap-out (and whenever a ticket inspector comes along). At the end of the day (or whenever they reconcile all of their data inputs in their system) they determine which cards tapped in, which cards tapped out, and which cards were inspected. If you've been inspected without tapping-in and out, you are penalized. If you've tapped-in without tapping-out, you pay the maximum fare. You also have per-day and per-week capping so that they only charge your credit card for the minimum of the sum of your individual trips, or the value of a daily or weekly pass over that period.
They can do this through
Quote:Offline payment is possible with Presto, and I believe GRT has gone with the same underlying technology. Moreover, they are unlikely to ever allow Android phones (or any non-GRT secured hardware) to communicate with the payment terminal. Because your card stores the account value, if you can access the hardware (and by hardware, I mean the chip that is embedded in the card), you could program in a balance which doesn't exist. Moreover, you certainly cannot transfer a card to your phone, because in doing so you'd be able to rewrite the balance.
To my knowledge there is no technical reason you can't put a stored-value card like easyGO Fare Card on Apple/Android Pay. (search words: "secure element" "NFC") There are lots of political reasons not to.
I'd see it far more likely that they'd furnish Apple/Android Pay with the device-specific card number and treat it like a credit card. Record the transactions, reconcile at day's end (but instead of reconciling against credit card companies, it would be against a centralized stored value balance). To be clear, I don't see this as at all likely, just _more_ likely.