Austrian mobile operator, mobilkom, said Tuesday that it has developed a chip-based NFC (Near Field Communications) system for mobile ticketing in conjunction with OBB – the Austrian Federal Railways group.

The chip-based NFC application is based on the international standard VDV-KA, allowing train passengers and ticket collectors to buy and mange tickets in a user friendly manner.

In partnership with Finnish handset vendor Nokia, the OBB has launched a pilot project involving 100 test customers and 100 ticket collectors, who will trial the new chip-based application on the test routes Vienna-Krems and Vienna-Gmund, using the NFC-capable 6212 classic handset for three months.

The Nokia 6212 classic will be commercially available from February 2009, and mobilkom austria will be the first mobile operator to offer this phone in Austria. In the initial stage, the 6212 will not be equipped with the NFC application, until the project is out of trial phase.

Tickets can be validated with a simple touch of the passengers’ and the conductor’s NFC enabled mobile phone, mobilkom said.

According to the handset vendor, in future, mobile ticketing and other NFC data will not be stored on a chip in the mobile handset but on the chip embedded in the SIM card instead. This will facilitate the switch from one NFC handset to another.

“The commercial availability of a SIM-based solution strongly depends on the implementation of the latest NFC standards. We expect to see such an implementation later in 2009,” said Jeremy Belostock, head of NFC at Nokia.