Adam Stroud, CEO of the Paxton Group, discusses the rise of NFC technology and its place in the access control market.
NFC technology – what is it?
Near Field Communication, or NFC, is essentially RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) technology, built into mobile phones. NFC means that your mobile phone can act as either a token or a reader. It provides an interaction between your phone and the real world.
NFC and its part in the future of access control
Often, before a technology becomes useful it is surrounded with hype. For example, biometrics were prominent on manufacturer’s stands at IFSEC and Essen. Less than 5% of access control installations actually use biometrics, so this is certainly not representative! With NFC, it has that buzz word status, but I believe there is a big turning point coming.
Right now, NFC hasn’t penetrated the mainstream industry. We can compare the tipping point to that of magstripe cards. When the banks adopted magstripe cards as a form of identification and payment, it became a widespread and publicly accepted technology. Standardisation and the access control industry followed. Proximity hasn’t seen this switchover because the banks haven’t adopted it as a technology. There are so many competing technologies, that it hasn’t been consolidated into one standard.
NFC offers the opportunity for RFID type standardisation. In the same way that magstripe did, when a technology comes in and is used by the majority of phones and banks, then the impact will be huge, because it will become the defacto technology.
Benefits of NFC
These days we all walk around with a powerful internet enabled computer in our pocket; our phone. To be able to interact with adverts, and with other devices, just by bringing them in close proximity is very useful. Without thinking about it you can bump phones with someone else, and swap contact details, present your phone, or type your PIN in at a pay point, and pay for something; these are the things we have heard about in the news.
If you think about what access control is, it’s identifying people. The way in which we identify people varies from entering a PIN, swiping a magstripe reader, presenting a normal proximity card, presenting your finger to a biometric reader, even a retina scan. NFC gives us a way of cost effectively identifying people just by communicating with what they already have. For the customer, they don’t need to pay for extra tokens. They can be conveniently given access permissions, without having an extra object to carry around.
Embracing the change
I don’t think access control will be the catalyst to make consumers embrace NFC. I think it will have to be in the public consciousness, and then it will happen. At the moment, mobile phones can do so much; operating as a camera, a browser, or potentially scanning QR codes. People are getting their heads around the fact that mobile phones can do more. When people embrace the technology for other purposes, then NFC will start to positively affect the access control sector.
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