The acronym „NFC“, which stands for Near Field Communication, refers to short-range communication. Short-range communication is a technology that allows wireless data transmission over short distances using radio waves.
NFC technology has been widely used for several years. By nature, NFC is an advancement of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology. The main difference between NFC and RFID is the communication range – RFID allows communication over longer distances, while NFC, as the name suggests, enables radio communication only at very short ranges. RFID technology allows connections to be made over distances of several dozen meters, which is why RFID is used in some countries for toll collection, where an RFID tag placed on a car's windshield automatically collects the toll as the car passes a toll booth. In contrast, NFC's maximum range is only a few centimeters, and NFC is predominantly used in smartphone applications through physical contact.
In phones, NFC is used in applications such as Google Pay, Android Pay, and Apple Pay. The Android platform introduced NFC in 2010 when the Google Nexus S model was released with NFC support. Apple introduced NFC in its phones in 2014, enabling the use of Apple Pay for NFC-based payments.
NFC is far from the only wireless communication protocol. Most devices already include similar technologies, such as Bluetooth and Ultra-Wideband (UWB). So why introduce another technology? One of NFC's biggest advantages is that it does not require pairing devices to establish a connection, while Bluetooth devices must be "discovered" and synchronized to pair, making the connection process somewhat more cumbersome. NFC is also significantly more energy-efficient than Bluetooth and UWB, as its transmission range is extremely short. As a result, NFC is already enabled by default on most smartphones, while Bluetooth is recommended to be turned off to save battery life.
