NEW YORK-Within five years, the Global Chipcard Alliance envisions a transformation from today’s fragmented patchwork of closed systems to a worldwide seamless environment of multipurpose smart cards, said David P. Anastasi, president of the non-profit organization.
Celebrating its first birthday this month, the alliance has a mission that, “starts with facilities-based telecommunications companies using their experience to create worldwide interoperability for voice and data transport,” he said at the Telecom Opportunities ’97 Conference & Exposition last month.
The alliance wants to create a new version of dial tone based on a worldwide platform for smart cards resulting from cross-industry business alliances and interoperability agreements. It doesn’t see its role as a standards-setting body for design of technologies and platforms, although standards would evolve as the natural result of cross-industry business agreements, Anastasi said.
It also would endorse standards and operating guidelines, including those to protect the privacy of consumers with respect to sensitive data, in order to advance multiple applications for smart cards and the promotion of electronic commerce.
“You can’t make money on telco alone,” he said. “With short, 18-month product life cycles, no one can go it alone.”
The alliance started with five members: US West Communications Inc., Bell Canada, PTT Telecom Netherlands, GTE Corp. and Telekom Malaysia. Its roster has grown to include 16 members companies, eight of which joined last month: IBM Corp., Microsoft, Telstra (Australia); GemPlus, Landis & Gyr Communications (Switzerland); Northern Telecom Inc.; SPT Telecom (Czech Republic); Elcotel Inc. (Florida). An additional 114 companies have applied for membership, said Anastasi, who also is general manager of public services for U S West, Seattle. Membership and other information is available on the alliance’s Web page at www.chipcard.org
Many of the participating carriers have wireless telecommunications businesses, mostly based on Global System for Mobile communications technology, he said. GSM and other wireless groups now are working on smart-card interoperability, but only within their own systems, and they still need encryption and key synchronization.
“The market is ready. The technology is ready. The suppliers are ready. The applications are ready. The merchants are ready. Consumers are ready,” he said.
“Is the industry ready? I’m really not sure. Standards are being used as a hindrance to entry. There are technology skirmishes, a lack of infrastructure and plays for dominance rather than sector balance,” Anastasi said.
Today, more than 75 percent of the smart cards in use are for telecommunications, primarily public wireline telephones. The number of smart cards in use worldwide totaled about 500 million in 1995 and that number is expected to grow to 3.3 billion by 2001, he said.
“Today’s smart card favors single applications. Even multiple applications, as on college campuses, still occur in a closed environment,” Anastasi said. “The tremendous investment in single and/or closed applications will be difficult to change.”
