On Jul 2, 11:30*pm, Matthew Geier
wrote:

On Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:47:15 -0700, Andrew Cullen wrote:
Oyster was meant to
be updated to ITSO technology but it doesn't appear to be happening. I
believe its a similar situation at SWT.

*They have changed something, last year when in London, I discovered the
LU readers were responding to my Singapore CEPAS card, where as the
Oyster readers on the buses were ignoring it.

*In fact they were responding to the CEPAS card while it was still in my
pocket and I was holding the Oyster in my hand next to the gate reader.

*Experiments with the ticket machines at Earls Court revealed the ticket
machine would respond to the Singapore CEPAS card at 30-40cm where as the
Oyster had to be with in 10cm. It's actually a surprise the security
people didn't come over and ask what I was doing :-)

*(Every time the Singapore card got anywhere near an LU Oyster terminal
it would respond with 'multiple cards presented', even if the proper
Oyster card was kept well away)

*At a guess the Oyster terminal was interacting with the card and
discovering it had multiple 'products' loaded, generating the multiple
card error before noticing that none of the products were usable by it
anyway. (The Singapore CEPAS cards are used to pay road tolls via
hardware installed in each car as well as transit fares, so I assume have
multiple 'products' loaded).

Interesting stuff - there is or was a programme to upgrade the Oyster
validators to handle ITSO standard cards as well as the MiFare type
(as used by Oyster cards) - afraid I'm not up on the details of this -
but it may be the case that these gates had been updated to have ITSO
capability.

My half-impression was that upgrading the validators would involve a
hardware modification, as opposed to just a software one, but I'm
really not clued up on that. Perhaps some of the newer Oyster
validators - such as the one you encountered - have always had the
ability to read ITSO cards as they are newer installations/
replacements, or something?

All that said, I realise I'm making the massive presumption that the
Singapore CEPAS card might be similar to the ITSO standard, but that's
hardly self-evident - ITSO is a British standard, of course that
doesn't mean that it can't be adopted elsewhere, but a quick glance at
the wiki article for CEPAS doesn't instantly betray it as being an
ITSO or ITSO-alike system (though it does appear to follow some ISO/
IEC smartcard standards). I wonder if there's anything MiFare-esque
about the CEPAS cards?