From multi-purpose tap to high-speed data: NFC exec shares what to look for next

Pick up any modern smartphone, and you know to expect it to support the familiar cast of wireless standards. It’s got to have cellular communication, obviously, as well as Wi-Fi. And right after those two, almost certainly Bluetooth and NFC. Seeing new standards like UWB still struggle to find broad support, it feels all the more impressive just how ubiquitous the others have become.

Just what do you know about these protocols that find a home in so many of the mobile devices we use? Last month at CES, I sat down with Mike McCamon, Executive Director of the NFC Forum, to pick his brain about where NFC is headed next, and why users like you should be excited about it.

More than just payments and passes

When we think about NFC, most of us probably go right to mobile payments — if you’ve tapped your phone or smartwatch to a payment terminal in a store, you’ve shared information over NFC. And since then, we’ve seen this expand to transit passes, loyalty cards, and even IDs. Basically, if we have data that we used to store on a card, it’s a probably a smart fit for NFC.

Using NFC in ways like this for so long, you might have developed some false impressions about the tech: it’s only for sending data, it can only handle limited amounts of data, or it’s so short-range that you pretty much have to be touching devices. The truth is, NFC is getting better and more feature-rich all the time, and many of those assumptions are now (or are becoming) wildly inaccurate.

Like other complicated modern protocols, NFC is always evolving, and periodically the NFC Forum publishes updated specifications that introduce new and improved functionality. The last of those arrived in June, with NFC Release 15. One of the big changes included there lets NFC work over a larger distance — up to 2cm — and critically, without breaking existing compatibility. McCamon tells me that this sort of continuity is a key component of the Forum’s work — with NFC already in everything, nobody wants to be forced to buy new hardware every time the spec changes.

The wireless power solution you never knew about

For my money, though, probably the biggest “unknown” feature of NFC is wireless power delivery — it can charge your devices, just like you’re familiar with Qi doing. Considering that NFC is everywhere, why aren’t we using it to charge more of our stuff?

Well, that’s a complicated answer, and McCamon frames it as the consequence of a number of issues, with the biggest probably being power output. Mobile device users can be incredibly demanding when it comes to the power we want out of our charging solutions — the more watts the better, right? Wired solutions are just more capable, charging our hardware in record time, and that’s really pushed our expectations in the direction of immediacy.

While Qi2 can deliver up to 25W, competing with wired charging, NFC Wireless Charging has been a lot more limited: first restricted to under 1W of power, and now targeting 3W with the help of partners like NuCurrent. That’s a big improvement, but it’s also nowhere near what users insist upon when charging devices with the power requirements of phones.

That’s not to say there’s no place for NFC Wireless Charging, and McCamon points out that it really shines in places where we can’t employ the sort of big, flat charging coils that something like Qi demands. That’s exactly why manufacturers have already started adopting it for charging the tiny batteries in wireless styluses. Another good use case here would be wirelessly charging earbuds — maybe not the case itself, which you’ll probably want to use a higher-output, faster method to charge, but the case could then use NFC to recharge the buds within.

How to give consumer products a memory

Another cool use for NFC that you probably haven’t experienced yet involves record-keeping. That sounds incredibly dry, but there’s a good reason that the industry is looking in this direction. The EU’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) will soon require that all manner of consumer products save data regarding their production, intended use, and disposal information. Squeezing all that on something like a QR code would just be untenable, while NFC, meanwhile, could be a handy, low-impact way to meet government requirements.

A big benefit for NFC in a case like this is how it can be updated. Take rechargeable batteries, for example. With it so easy for batteries to fail spectacularly, it’s important not just keep track of their manufacture, but also what they experience across a lifetime of use. With NFC DPPs, something like an e-bike battery could store an onboard record of exactly how many charging cycles it’s been through, or the maximum temperature it ever reached.

Doing more at once with multi-purpose tap

Maybe the most powerful new NFC capability that McCamon shared with me is one that involves what’s called “observe” mode. When your phone’s in this state, it’s just passively listening to the signals coming from NFC terminals. So, for instance, instead of you pulling up an NFC copy of your boarding pass at the airport, and then tapping your phone to the terminal, observe mode could proactively recognize which pass the terminal was seeking, and automatically return the correct data.

A very slick side effect of observe mode is that it streamlines multi-credential interactions. Let’s say you’re making a purchase at a store, and in addition to making a contactless payment, you’d also like to use an NFC copy of your loyalty card, or maybe you’re buying alcohol and need to share some ID. With observe mode, the NFC terminal just tells your phone the credentials it’s looking for, and then your phone can quickly provide them all in one tap.

An evolving standard for evolving needs

Looking even further down the road, speed is the name of the game. NFC didn’t start out with the need for transmitting a ton of data, very quickly, and its limited data bandwidth is reflected in the sort of use cases we have for it today. But supporting higher transfer rates also opens the door for new, more flexible uses, and it only makes sense that the NFC Forum is interested in keeping the standard as relevant as possible by enhancing it with better data speeds.

That’s part of the latest roadmap for NFC’s future, published this week by the NFC Forum. Back in 2023, the organization outlined goals for NFC’s growth across the five years to come, and now, three years in, it’s updating that plan with some new ones.

Officially, NFC only handles data as fast as 106kbps — sufficient for text, not great for media. And while there’s hardware capable of going faster, so far it hasn’t been standardized. But now the Forum is starting to embrace higher-speed connectivity, and is formalizing support for 848kbps data. While still slow compared to many other standards, that’s finally got the bandwidth to directly support media — like how you’d want a photo to be a part of a digital ID. Instead of using NFC to set up a separate data session over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, the protocol is adapting to handle such transfers itself.

When I asked McCamon about the areas he was most excited to see NFC grow in, he mentioned access control, and sure enough, this week’s updated roadmap emphasizes NFC digital keys. One useful-sounding idea there concerns hybrid key hardware, combining NFC, Bluetooth, and UWB for the broadest possible hardware support and feature set.

For as exciting as a lot of this looks, it’s important to keep in mind how big even the smallest of these changes are, considering NFC’s vast reach. That’s why it’s so critical that the players involved take a deliberate, measured approach to implementing them — and why we’re talking about feature roadmaps with a timeline of years, rather than months.

NFC got where it is today by being quick and reliable. Break something there, and you’ll never hear the end of it. So for all of these big plans we’re talking about, we’re looking at a whole lot of testing — and that takes time. High speed NFC data sounds great, for example, but the new modulation will require changes to NFC’s analog signal encoding, and engineers need to make sure all of that still stays within boundaries.

Have a little patience, though, and chances are you’ll start to notice all the little ways NFC keeps getting better.