NFC technology uses near-field communication to provide a variety of convenience in our lives, such as easy payments, book borrowing, and transportation cards using smartphones. The short communication distance, high security, and two-way communication make it highly versatile, but it has yet to fully take root in society. For the future of NFC, more terminals and infrastructure are needed.
Let’s say you go to the library to borrow a book. First, you choose the book you want to see. When choosing a book, you usually look at the title or the cover, but sometimes you also like a recommendation or a book that you stumbled upon on the shelf. After browsing for a while, you finally find a book that you like. Then you go to the kiosk. You’ll need to scan the book’s barcode or enter the barcode number manually. But you don’t have to do that, you can just place the book on the machine and it will automatically recognize exactly which book it is. Not just one book, but three or four books at once. On the back cover of the book, there is an NFC tag in the form of a sticker. This NFC tag transmitted the book’s information to the machine without any direct contact. As technology advances, simple tasks like this are becoming much more convenient. This NFC technology isn’t just for libraries. In fact, NFC is already deeply entrenched in modern life. It’s used in smartphones, payment systems, transportation cards, and more. In this article, we’ll tell you more about this technology.
NFC (Near Field Communication) is a short-range wireless communication method that allows two or more devices to come within 10 centimeters of each other and exchange data directly without using a communication network. The NFC technology itself was developed in 2002, but it didn’t become a big deal at the time due to the difficulty of distributing related devices and tags and the lack of social infrastructure to use NFC. However, the market for smartphones that can act as NFC terminals began to flourish, and in 2010, when Nokia announced that it would release smartphones with NFC technology, companies began to develop smartphones with NFC technology. As a result, almost all smartphones today are equipped with NFC technology. As a result, users have been able to utilize NFC features on their smartphones for a variety of everyday tasks without much difficulty.
Although the term NFC is new, it’s already commonplace in our daily lives. For example, you can use your smartphone to swipe your transportation card, pay with your smartphone without a credit card, manage your inventory by attaching NFC tags to each item in a public institution or company, use your smartphone to access ATMs without a card or passbook by storing your personal account information on your USIM, or even use your smartphone to replace your car keys. These everyday examples show just how versatile NFC is. But what are the advantages of NFC that make it so ubiquitous?
The first benefits of NFC are convenience and security. NFC is limited to a communication distance of less than 10 centimeters. However, this limitation solves two problems: convenience and security. In terms of convenience, the limited communication distance makes it necessary to bring the device close to the user, so the device that the user wants to connect to is naturally recognized. And since communication is impossible even if it is slightly out of range, other devices are physically blocked from connecting wirelessly. This greatly increases security. The second advantage is that it’s a two-way communication. Take a transportation card for example. You can give information to a terminal by touching it, but you can’t get something from it. However, with the NFC feature in your smartphone, your smartphone can act not only as a transportation card, but also as a reader that can check the balance of other transportation cards. The ability to act as both a reader and a tag means that there is a lot of scope for applications. This allows users to process information in a more versatile and efficient way. However, with every advantage comes a disadvantage. Due to the short range mentioned above as an advantage, NFC requires the device to be held up to the user at all times. This makes it difficult to apply the technology where the user has to type a lot of commands in between. That’s why NFC is currently mostly used in applications that require only a few moments of authentication, payment, etc.
The principle behind this technology is electromagnetic induction. Electromagnetic induction refers to the phenomenon that when the magnetic field around a wire changes, current flows through the wire, and when current flows through the wire, a magnetic field is created around the wire. When an NFC terminal changes the surrounding magnetic field to a specific frequency band, current flows from a nearby NFC tag (or a device that acts as a tag) and processes the information inside. In turn, the NFC tag changes the magnetic field according to the processed information, and the NFC terminal detects the change in the magnetic field and accepts the processed information. In this way, the NFC terminal flows current to the NFC tag by changing the magnetic field, allowing the transportation card to operate without any power source. This is especially useful in item management or book lending systems. A tag attached to a book can be used to quickly process information from a large number of books.
As you can see, NFC technology has only recently gained prominence and is being applied to a wide variety of applications, mainly due to its convenience and the fact that smartphones are an essential part of modern life. It’s likely that NFC will continue to evolve rapidly, and in the future, it may play a larger role in more complex technologies beyond simple payments and authentication. However, NFC is not yet fully embedded in society. The lack of NFC-enabled terminals and low awareness among users hasn’t made for a bright future. In order for NFC to become more familiar to us, it will take more than just the telecommunications companies that are applying NFC technology to their smartphones, but also the companies that are distributing apps and devices that support the technology. At the same time, if more people realize the potential of NFC through user education, NFC will become more than just a technology, but a major change in society as a whole.
