Bangalore, January 25, 2012 – Silicon City’s metro rail system, NammaMetro has adopted the internationally used MIFARE DESFire contactless and Near Field Communication-fuelled smart card and automated fare collection system from NXP Semiconductors.
The first sector of the third metro to be opened in India after the Kolkata and the Delhi Metros, was opened in October 2011 and when fully completed will 41 stations serving over one million passengers a day. Namma Metro will be a fully contactless system, offering a number of flexible fare structures including trip tickets and stored value tickets and day tickets.
“We want to offer our passengers a unique experience and we’re working with our partners to create new services which really add value for our passengers. In this connection, we are working with the State Bank of India to popularize India’s first joint banking debit cum transit card, and with telecom companies to enable giving easy recharging options and also pay-as-you-go services for the travel cards,” says Mr. A S Shankar, Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation's Chief Engineer (Signalling and Telecommunication).
Adds Henri Ardevol, vice president and general manager, secure transactions, NXP Semiconductors: “Namma Metro is a giant step for public transportation systems in India. With our R&D development centre in Bengaluru, we are both supplier and user of this latest, state-of- the-art transport system, and ready to serve the growing transportation needs of this dynamic city.”
This is the third major MIFARE DESFire EV1 transport installation in India. In addition to powering the Delhi Metro, NXP’s technology is being used by India’s Centre for Railway Information Systems, part of the Ministry of Railways, to bring AFC to railways across India.
Technology:
NXP’s MIFARE DESFire technology is an open architecture platform, uniquely built around the needs of public transport ticketing systems. It supports fast transactions, advanced security and privacy features, and the ability to host multiple independent applications. This facilitates the integration of services such as banking through MIFARE DESFire EV1 implementation on payment cards. The product is based on open global standards for both air interfaces and cryptographic methods. In addition to offering data transfer rates of up to 848 kbit/s, MIFARE DESFire utilizes Triple DES, 3K DES and AES hardware cryptographic engines for securing the data on the smartcards and data during transmission.
NXP MiFare link: www.mifare.net
NammaMetro link: http://bmrc.co.in/