Category: Suica App

Final frontiers: How Suica 2.0 will solve the IC fare region barrier problem and much more

The Suica cross region problem, no thru transit going from the Suica area to the TOICA area for example, is a well known and criticized shortcoming of the Transit IC system. There has been some recent progress with cross region thru transit commuter passes but barriers remain for regular Suica use, a headache for both local residents and longer distance travelers. Despite all the fancy technology, the cheapest cross region thru transit fare choice is paper tickets.

The entire Suica/PASMO service region is huge but covers less than half of the entire JR East rail network

A lesser known Suica barrier remains on the JR East network: Suica service region gaps. Currently there are 3 Suica regions: Tokyo, Sendai and Niigata. There are also some curious gaps between them illustrated below:

The Tokyo~Sendai Suica Gap
The Tokyo~Niigata Suica Gap

Fortunately this is all about to change for the better.

Filling the Suica gaps
In 2019 JR East CEO Yuji Fukusawa said the company planned to have 100% Suica deployment by March 2022 but that didn’t happen. Why? Transit use killing COVID, the resulting red ink and redeployed resources are a big reason of course, but system development snags certainly contributed to the missed deadline. There was also a shift from a narrow focus of a lower cost Suica system to a wider focus of Suica 2 in 1, Cloud Suica and a cloud based central fare processing system. JR East’s Suica vision is evolving to a wider, transit service platform encompassing a range of technologies, with FeliCa as one component of a larger whole and flexible new system.

In October 2022 JR Central announced that TOICA is expanding to all JR Central lines and stations. The pressure is now on JR East to complete their delayed Suica rollout to all stations first. But there is something else: it’s an open secret that JR East hosts the TOICA system. JR Central would not make such a big TOICA commitment publicly unless JR East had a new system in place to facilitate the expansion. This new system, which I call Suica 2.0, starts operation on May 27 in the Tohoku region.

The launch brings Suica to 45 stations in the Akita, Aomori and Morioka regions but only 9 of these are fully automatic transit gate installations similar to what you find in Tokyo area stations (the same new QR equipped gates shown in the press announcement are installed in Yoyogi station). The rest, 36 in all, are Suica 2.0 validators. Performance is an obvious concern. Suica users are accustomed to the fastest transit gate fare processing speeds on the planet. Will Suica 2.0 performance satisfy an Suica 1.0 experienced customer base with high expectations? To understand how Suica 1.0 fare gates achieve speedy performance apart from FeliCa technology, we need to examine why Suica regions exist and how they relate to transit gate performance.


Suica stands for “Super Urban Intelligent CArd” (but there is also ‘IC’ in the name for integrated chip) and was designed for heavily used urban transit as a smart card recreation of visually inspected paper commuter passes. JNR (pre JR East) researchers wanted to eliminate the time it took urban commuters to pull their magnetic commuter pass out of a wallet or case and feed it into the ticket gate slot. This clogged up major station gates at rush hour. The researchers also wanted a centrally processed card system but the networks and processing power of that time could not deal with the rush hour traffic volume. So the Suica architecture was built around locally transit gate processed stored fare (SF) balance from the card. Instead of centrally processed payments, fares are processed at the station level and synced with the central server, said to be about 6 times a day.

Transit gates have very little memory, most of it dedicated to their main task of local processing Suica fare at the exit point. Low overhead is a necessity. They can’t hold massive fare tables, hot card lists, dead card lists and so on. Only the bare minimum information required to do the local processing job is periodically synced with the central server. Limiting fare processing to specific heavy use regions is a necessary strategy in keeping the local fare processing overhead low and speedy. This is why a Tokyo Suica/PASMO region transit exit gate only processes the fare from a Suica or PASMO (or any Transit IC card) that started the journey in the same region. It’s also the reason why Transit IC cards are generally limited to 200 km point to point trips in their respective local regions, though there are some interesting loopholes.

It’s the same situation writ large with different transit IC card regions. Border stations like Atami (Suica and TOICA) have 2 sets of exit gates: one for travelers from the Suica region, one for travelers from the TOICA region. Suica/TOICA cross region thru transit is limited to special cross region commuter passes and those are limited to specific cross region stations, again to keep the local processing overhead low.

Atami Station has 2 sets of gates for IC card travelers from difference regions.
The Gotemba line is another JR Central TOICA line that docks with JR East Suica at Kōzu Station.

It’s important to note however that IC coverage extensions to border stations with 2 sets of different gates and cross region commuter passes, are very recent 2021 developments. This is the JR Group companies laying the foundation to remove IC transit barriers in the near future. Because Suica 2.0 can process any and all Transit IC fare configurations, transit gate memory limits for local processing are no longer a concern. The barriers will come down when gate hardware•firmware is updated and Suica 2.0 cloud servers are in place.

Suica 1.0 local processing vs Suica 2.0 cloud processing
But transit gate performance is a concern. Does this mean that with all Suica fare processing migrating to the cloud users can kiss the good old speedy Suica gate experience goodbye? JR East says no. In fact they say Suica will get even faster with central server processing. Really? Recent comments from JR East suggest a 10ms network overhead. Suica 1.0 is rated at 200ms for fare processing though in reality the performance feels faster thanks to the large NFC RF hit area of Suica gate readers.

JR East New Suica System press release 2023-04-04

Conceptually, Suica 2.0 is simply going back to what the creators of Suica originally envisioned: centralized fare processing. Specifically the Suica fare processing hockey puck is moving from the station level to centralized cloud servers. The Suica card itself is exactly the same as it is now, the transit gates still handle all mutual authentication read~write functions. Hopefully Suica 2.0 performance will be just like it is now:

The original aims of Cloud Suica with lower costs and flexibility are still there, the JR East Suica 2.0 press release builds on those with emphasis on a distributed server processing system for both Suica service expansion (more stations and no region barriers) and service functions (all kinds of cloud linked services). Let’s examine the new kinds of services JR East is promising to deliver with Suica 2.0.

① Barrier Free Suica transit with no more region gaps. A main goal of Suica 2.0 and bigger than it might seem. Eki-Net Shinkansen eTickets are already ‘barrier free’ with Suica, through clever use of Shinkansen transit gates, but Ticketless Limited Express trains are stuck with Suica barriers such as the Tokyo to Sendai Hitachi and Tokiwa Limited Express trains. Suica users have long complained that service gaps forces them to travel with paper tickets, or they are forced to pay in cash at the exit gate because they tapped in with Suica in Tokyo and forgot the Suica barriers. This problem, and many more barrier Suica gap issues will be eliminated.

② Automated Fare Discounts Part 1: Commute Plan Lite. This is similar to the recently launched Off-Peak Commuter Passes, think of it as short term ‘commute plan lite’ with tons of options. You buy a discounted fare option for certain routes, use times or frequency and it’s automatically linked with your Suica. And unlike the current Suica App method, the items are added in the cloud, not written and stored on the card itself.

③ Automated Fare Discounts Part 2: Fare Discount Gift Coupons. In a similar vein, fare discount reward coupons for store purchases with Suica can be automatically gifted with a tap at the payment terminal. Kinda like the old free parking ticket with store purchase gimmick only far more useful.

④ Linked MaaS services. JR East has been experimenting with MaaS programs like RingoPass but linking MaaS services with Suica 1.0 is a real pain. Suica 2.0 should make bundling much easier, it’s also an opportunity to clean up the current mess of apps.

Reality check and missing pieces
Glossy JR East press releases are one thing but reading between the lines of the Suica Service Roadmap there are hints of missing pieces. Suica 2.0 is all about eliminating physical transit barriers but in the mobile app era there are lots of software barriers that need to be addressed too. Right now JR East online services are hosted in a bunch of apps that don’t fit together very well. It’s a maze of walled gardens: lots of service apps each with different accounts and login, making them work together is a real pain. The real problem is there is no one app to see and manage all the services and tickets attached or linked to your Suica.

A few things need to happen to make Suica 2.0 truly useful.

  • My JR East ID 2.0
  • Cloud savvy Suica App with plug-in services
    • The current version of Suica App lives a double life: one half pulls things off the Mobile Suica cloud, one half does local housekeeping attaching Commute Plans, Green Car Seat Tickets and recharges to Suica card. Meanwhile Shinkansen eTickets, MaaS and other online services live in different apps with different accounts IDs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all these services living in one cloud savvy Suica App that shows and manages everything attached to your Suica? Absolutely yes please.
  • Local Processing Fail-Safe?
    • We all know that cloud and mobile services fail. Stuff happens. Safe railroad operation requires fail-safe design. Japanese IT journalists like to pooh-pooh FeliCa and Suica reliability, heaping praise on how ‘fail-safe’ the Transit for London open loop Oyster system is. But London transit doesn’t have to deal with major earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, torrential rain and flooding, train communication cable arsonists, communication cable damaging trackside fire disasters, not to mention sarin gas and cable cutting terrorists. Japanese tend to take safety and security for granted but these infrastructure risks are very real. They have all happened. Suica 2.0 will be a highly centralized system, the higher the centralization, the higher the associated risks when it fails.

      Does Suica 2.0 have a fail-safe backup? Here’s a possible, and from emerging details, likely scenario. We all know programmers don’t like using a new API for mission-critical programs unless they have to. They like to stick with what they already have for compatibility with a smooth gradual transition strategy to the new API. Same for Suica 2.0. Automatic Suica transit gates could be upgraded with both the Suica 1.0 ‘Suica Region local processing API’ and the new Suica 2.0 ‘Region-Free central processing API’. If something goes wrong with the Suica 2.0 central servers, the exit gates switch to reliable local processing Suica 1.0 API mode to keep passengers moving with station level fare processing or perhaps regional level fare processing depending on the JR East distributed server setup. Long story short, If this backup is not in place we can expect this to happen.

Suica 2.0 rollout and the QR Eki-Net Connection
We’ll find out how well Suica 2.0 works on May 27…hopefully it will be a happy marriage of ‘truth in the card’ Suica Stored Fare balance + central fare processing. The important point is that all Transit IC card barriers will eventually go away when Suica 2.0 is deployed across the entire JR East system. People can travel anywhere on the transit IC network not having to think about barrier nonsense, just like paper tickets. Sounds great but when does it happen?

JR East says the Suica region barriers will drop by 2026, at the latest, when Suica 2.0 is rolled out across the entire JR East network. Suica 2.0 starts in Tohoku May 27, Tokyo gets the Suica 2.0 update this summer (2023), Sendai is next, followed by Niigata. At the same time all Suica gaps will be filled, all stations currently without Suica will be wired. We will find out if Suica 2.0 is really faster than Suica 1.0 but the 3 year rollout, roughly 1 year per current Suica region, certainly looks like a lot of system optimization work is padded into the schedule.

An interesting point here is that QR Eki-Net service starts in the very same Suica 2.0 Tohoku launch region which means that QR Eki-Net uses the same Suica 2.0 fare validation system. Suica 2.0 does QR too. When Suica 2.0 goes wide, so does QR. It’s one package with 2 parts as shown in the Suica Service Roadmap: the Suica 2.0 Platform and a ‘new’ (and unnamed) Ticketing system, which might be the venerable (and earthquake hardened) JR Group MARS system updated for the mobile transit era.

And when does seamless cross region IC transit for Suica, TOICA, et al. happen? Hopefully the JR Group is coordinating so that the Suica 2.0 rollout is mirrored by the other JR Group companies. The JR Central TOICA announcement certainly suggests so. Slight differences are already apparent: JR East prefers cloud connected Suica 2.0 validators at unmanned stations. JR Central and JR West prefer the bus style approach of having on board enter and exit validators for rural lines with unmanned stations. Either way is fine, just get it done as quickly as possible. Let the Transit IC barriers drop away into the past where they belong. Because with Suica 2.0 in place and barriers gone, the way is also cleared for fare capping, automated discounts, specialty ticketing and lots of new cloud based transit services.

This post was originally published 2023-02-27 and was reposted with the latest information from JR East on 2023-04-04.

Related post: Thoughts on Suica 2.0

Recharge your recharge, the winner/loser debate doesn’t mean jack in the post-Apple Pay Japanese payments market

I love articles like this one. It’s fun examining how the writer, freelancer Meiko Homma, takes old news bits, worn-out arguments and weaves them into a ‘new’ narrative with a titillatingly hot title: “QR Code payments won the cashless race, Suica utterly defeated.”

Her article trots out some QR Code payment usage data from somewhere, the PASPY transit card death saga that illustrates the increasingly difficult challenge of keeping region limited transit IC cards going, the fact that Suica only covers 840 stations out of a total of 1630, all while conveniently ignoring recent important developments like the Suica 2 in 1 Regional Affiliate program, and big updates coming in early 2023: Cloud Suica extensions and the Mobile ICOCA launch.

It has the classic feel of ‘here’s a headline, now write the article’ hack piece passing as industry analysis we have too much of these days. The Yahoo Japan portal site picked it up and the comments section was soon full of wicked fun posts picking apart the weak arguments.

I’ve said it before and say it again: the winner/loser debate doesn’t mean shit in the post-Apple Pay Japanese payments market. PayPay for example, started out as a code payment app but has added FeliCA QUICPay and EMV contactless support along with their PayPay card offering. Just like I predicted, these companies don’t care about payment technology, they just want people to use their services. My partner and I actually see less PayPay use at checkout these days and more Mobile Suica. Why?

The great thing about prepaid eMoney ‘truth in the card’ Suica, PASMO, WAON, Edy, nanaco, is they are like micro bank accounts coupled with the backend recharge flexibility of mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Suica App, etc.). PayPay, au Pay, Line Pay and similar Toyota Wallet knock-off payment apps with Apple Pay Wallet cards, are deployed as mobile recharge conduits that smart users leverage to put money into different eMoney micro bank accounts and get the points or instant cashback rebates they want to get at any given campaign moment. This is where the action is.

And so we have recharge acrobats like Twitter user #1: step 1 recharge PayPay account from Seven Bank account, step 2 move recharge amount from PayPay Money to PayPay Bank, step 3 move recharge from PayPay Bank to Line Pay, in Wallet app recharge Suica with Line Pay card. Or like recharge acrobat Twitter user #2: Sony Bank Wallet to Kyash to Toyota Wallet to Suica.

#1
#2

Phew…none of this involves transfer fees so it’s up to user creativity to come up with the recharge scenario that works best for them. Does it count as PayPay use or Line Pay use or Mobile Suica use? Does it matter?

It’s not about winners or losers, it’s about moving money around. Mobile Suica is extremely useful because of it’s recharge backend flexibility, thanks to Apple Pay and Google Pay (which does not support PASMO yet). This is the case for US citizens working in Japan who get a great return of their Suica or PASMO recharge right now using US issue credit cards because of the exchange rate. This is something visitors to Hong Kong cannot do with Apple Pay Octopus as the OCL recharge backend is far more restrictive than JR East. The biggest gripe users have with Suica is ¥20,000 balance limit.

In the weeks to come we’ll be sure to see hand wringing articles debating the future of Suica, open-loop, etc.,etc., because let’s face it, IT media journalists need something to write about in these challenging times where everything has to be sold as winner/loser, black/white, 0 or 10, and nothing in-between, to get any traction at all. As for me, I think it’s far more interesting, and real, to observe how users are using all these nifty mobile payment tools.

UPDATE 2022-07-04: Thoughts on the KDDI network outage
That was fast. No sooner had the “QR Codes won the mobile payments race” article appeared when major Japanese carrier KDDI experienced a nationwide mobile network meltdown on July 2 JST, lasted a full day with a very slow, still in progress, recovery affecting more than 40 million customers. Suddenly social media channels were full of people complaining that QR Code payments didn’t work, assuming that Mobile Suica and other NFC mobile payments stopped too. Which was not the case though a few fake posts claimed, or just ‘assumed’ people were stranded inside stations. Fortunately there were numerous online articles setting the record straight.

It’s a lesson that people soon forget in our attention span challenged social media era. We saw plenty of QR Code payment downsides in the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquake that knocked out power and mobile service across Hokkaido. At the time some fake Chinese social media posts claimed AliPay and WeChat pay ‘still worked’ in Hokkaido at the time, of course they did not.

Mobile payment disruptions happen with every natural disaster and war. Good and safe practices don’t come easy when smartphone apps lure us down the easy path without spelling out the risks. It’s a lesson we have to learn again and again, that while network dependent code payment apps have some benefits, they also have limits and security risks. One size does not fit all, NFC and code payments each have their place and role to play in the expanding mobile payments universe. The key is understanding their strengths and weaknesses.

Bad Suica App reviews, real or urban legend?

Suica App user reviews are relentlessly bad, rip after rip of ‘this software sucks’. Never a good thing to say. Here’s the thing however, when you dig into the reviews most of them have little to do Suica App. It’s also really weird that many reviewers/users seem to think they need Suica App for using Suica at the transit gate. They don’t.

Why are people even using Suica App anyway? You don’t need it to add Suica to iPhone, you don’t need it to recharge Suica. All these things can be done in Wallet app. And now that people are working remotely, there is much less demand for purchasing commuter passes, the biggest reason for using Suica App in the first place. But there is one good reason for using Suica App: setting up Auto-Charge. Set that and you’ll never have to use Suica App.

There’s an important difference to know about Auto-Charge vs. regular recharge in Suica app and Wallet app: auto-charge is locally processed via the transit gate Suica NFC reader. It’s instantaneous and doesn’t care about your iPhone network connection.

Wallet and Suica app recharge are processed via the iPhone (or Apple Watch) network connection. Apple Pay talks with iCloud and Mobile Suica, the transaction is processed online and relayed back to Apple Pay, the recharge amount is added to Suica card. Many network hoops.

There is a message the Mobile Suica twitter account puts out regularly: make sure your smartphone has a robust network connection and don’t use free WiFi when recharging Suica or using Suica App. A bad WiFi connection fools Suica App users into thinking their iPhone is connected to the internet when it is not. This is a particular problem with carrier Wi-Fi SIM auto-connect that bypasses a solid 4G/5G connection and automatically connects to an extremely unstable or overloaded carrier WiFi instead. WiFi on trains and in stations is never reliable and should be turned off when using recharging Suica in Wallet or using Suica App.

Which brings us to an interesting Suica App user review titled “It’s a real urban legend” which explains all the crap talk about Mobile Suica boils down to people trying to recharge at rush hour in transit gate areas with a crapped out carrier or free WiFi connection…the perfect Suica App killer situation. The reviewer recommends “recharge in a calm place at calm time,” to which I heartily agree. Or better yet, ditch network recharge altogether and use Suica NFC Auto-Charge. It will never fail you.

Deliciously timely iOS 15.4 Wallet and Mobile Suica day pass support

Mobile Suica day pass support starts March 12
Nobiri Holiday
Tokyo Free Pass
Tokyo Ward Pass
Yokohama-Minatomirai Free Pass
Mobile Suica day pass types and coverage

JR East announced 2 new features for Mobile Suica yesterday: day passes and student commuter pass online purchase and renewal support. Day passes are already available for plastic Suica, Mobile Suica support starts March 12. The 4 passes are: Nobiri Holiday, Tokyo Ward Pass, Tokyo Free Pass, Yokohama-Minatomirai Free Pass.

These Mobile Suica passes will not be available at the local station ticket window, they are purchased in a new version of Suica App due by the service launch date. Only regular Mobile Suica or Mobile Suica with expired commute plan can be used for day passes, Mobile Suica with valid a commuter plan attached cannot be used. JR East is promoting the passes offering bonus JRE POINT when purchased in Suica App with a VIEW credit card.

New Wallet app strings in iOS 15.4 developer beta found by Steve Moser

The very next day after the JR East announcement Apple released the first developer iOS 15.4 beta with many new features including Wallet app strings related to transit card commute plans and stored value, such as “Save money with time based or unlimited ride plans.”

The delicious timing is not coincidence: Apple Pay Suica will certainly put these new iOS 15.4 Wallet strings to good use when the new day passes launch. Wallet app currently indicates when a Suica card is a regular type or has a commute plan attached. The addition of Suica day passes require some sort of new Wallet UI indicator.

One interesting aspect of the Mobile Suica commuter pass limitation: the current card architecture only has one area for attachted commute plans, if there is a valid commute plan it must be removed before a day pass can be added. This storage limitation is addressed by Suica 2 in 1 which holds up to 2 different commute plans but even here there is the problem of conflicting commute plan + day pass plan that exist for the same transit region on the same card. There is no way for the transit gate to determine which one to use for fare calculation: commute plan or day pass. Hence the ‘no commute plan’ rule.

Mobile Suica student commuter passes (university or vocational schools) have been around for some time, but purchase and renewal required a trip to the local JR East ticket office to confirm the school issue student ID. From February 13 students purchase and renew Mobile Suica student commute plans in a new version of Suica App after pre-registration and uploading a picture of the student ID for verification via the Mobile Suica member site (that got a desperately needed refresh). Still somewhat of a pain but much better than before.

Imagine how easy it would be if a digital student ID card loaded in Wallet could be used for secure digital confirmation instead of uploading a picture and mailing a paper copy. In time digital ID will hopefully deliver this kind of time saving convenience.

The updated Mobile Suica member site adds student commute pass pre-registration with student ID picture upload for verification.

JR East eliminating 70% of ticket offices by 2025 in ticketless push

In the run-up to the June 27 Eki-Net reboot next month JR East released a nice looking PR release with the first 2 pages promoting a ticketless future. On page 3 they dropped a bomb: JR EAST will eliminate ‘up to’ 70% of their ticket offices by 2025, just 140 stations or so on the entire JR East rail network will have the honor of having a ticket office manned by real people:

JR East has been planning this for years and report that in 2019 only 30% of JR East ticketing was purchased at a JR East Ticket Window (Midori-guchi). In 2020 that number declined to 20%. Could it be people were so tired of waiting in long slow ticket office lines they bought tickets elsewhere? Let’s be real though, the COVID pandemic has hit transit so hard all expenses that can be cut will be cut. You will going ticketless whether you like it or not.

So yes, we have Mobile Suica and Eki-Net Ticketless for regular express trains, Touch and Go Shinkansen, Mobile Suica and Shinkansen eTickets. By 2025 I suspect QR tickets will have replaced mag strip tickets. The Cloud Suica system coming in 2023 is said to power QR ticketing as well. All is good, I guess. Except for when you need help at the transit gate for some weird ticket problem, a smartphone that died before you got to the last station because you were too wrapped up playing games on it. What do you do? Press a button for an online station agent:

JR East says real station agents will be available to offer real assistance for disabled customers and such. We shall see. If JRE wants people to use Suica as much as possible they need to get Suica disability discount fares in order and working on mobile. Right now they are only working in the 2 in 1 totra Suica region. They need to work everywhere.