Japanese IC cards are so amazingly fast I don’t even have to slow down from a fast walk when paying for access to the subway line, or any train or vending machine for that matter.
In other countries, you have to tap the card on the machine and leave it there for a few seconds before it registers your pay.
How did japan get their IC cards to work so fast?
In: Technology
It’s not so much about the card but the scanning equipment itself. The card itself only holds a few bytes of data. The scanner takes the card data, and has to run them against a database to ensure that the card is valid and has money for the fare. This database is not stored inside the scanner itself but somewhere else, probably not even in the station itself but most likely a centralised server location. So basically in Japan, or at least Tokyo, given the volume of passengers on trains and their priority on smooth and quick operation, they’ve made sure that the latency on this process is as low as possible.
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