RFID in Japan

It was March 1999 when NTT introduced so-called "IC Card Public Phones." These RFID-based public phones (right) were expected to replace existing magnetic card based public phones (left). However, NTT recently decided to discontinue the effort of spreading these great high-tech public phones with embedded RFID sensors and Infrared receivers.
In the near future, all public phones in Japan will be the same old gray magnetic-card-based ones. Thank God, they have data ports for mobile computers.

(photo taken at a JR train station in Tokyo last week)

source NTT East Press Release, January 20, 2005, in Japanese

Posted by konomi at January 28, 2005 06:42 AM | TrackBack