There’s been a lot of online discussion of the NFC Forum NFC Release 15 announcement. The public can’t access new specification details until this fall but the headline feature of NFC Release 15 is increasing the maximum operating range of NFC contactless connections from 0.5 centimeters to 2 centimeters. In short wearables with tiny NFC antennas will get more reliable single tap performance. Eventually. It will take time for the new NFC spec to trickle down from NFC 15 compliant chips going into devices and cards that in turn have to be NFC 15 certified by NFC Forum member testing labs.
From the transit gate and store payment tap terminal standpoint I don’t see any big charge as MIFARE/EMV readers already have a 2 cm hit operating range for cards, (while Suica/FeliCa has a 8.5 cm hit range). And we all know that smartphones have a ‘faster’ tap speeds on MIFARE/EMV gate readers because of larger smartphone antennas, larger antennas work farther away from the reader so the transit user perceives it as working ‘faster’ though transaction speed is really a bunch of things. Despite a lot of stupid articles from folks who should know better, like MacRumors, Apple Pay won’t get ‘faster’. It’s already fast and reliable but maybe Tap to Pay on iPhone transactions with tiny antenna wearables might become a little more reliable.
Improved reliability is always a good thing but I get the sense that despite all the advertised improvements, NFC 15 is really aimed at improving plastic card / NFC tag reads with smart devices. I mean Type B Japanese My Number card reads with my iPhone are just lousy and slow despite slapping the big iPhone NFC antenna right on the plastic card. It sucks. So does App Clip NFC tag reads (does anybody actually use it?). QR Code reading sucks too but people know how to use it and it’s everywhere…so it sucks less. Or seems to anyway.
We’ll see how the NFC Release 15 hype goes though I suspect it will be years before there’s enough new NFC infrastructure out there to really measure NFC performance improvements, or lack thereof, in day to day use. Until then, enjoy the NFC Release 15 hype.