Smartcards and smart tickets have a number of advantages over the old magnetic-strip tickets. Foremost among these are the resilience, reliability, security and ease of use of the smartcards.

The upgrade route from mag-stripe cards to contactless smartcards or smart-tickets is an obvious one, but is often not considered viable due to the requirement to replace or upgrade the back office system to be smartcard compatible.

Due to the intelligent nature of the Diamond reader, it is now possible to replace the mag-stripe readers in most systems with a suitably configured Diamond smartcard reader. The reader deals with the security and cryptography required to read and write the cards, and responds to the host or back office system as though it were a mag-stripe reader.

The upshot of this is that it is now possible to upgrade a mag-stripe system to use smartcards or smart tickets without affecting any of the host or back office systems. Even the simplest of smart tickets can be employed due to the diversified key cryptography used to encode the data on the cards. Unlike mag-stripe, the cards cannot be copied so system security is greatly enhanced.

This approach can be employed for any system which is capable of using serial interface mag-stripe readers. There is a one off cost associated with a feasibility assessment of the existing hardware, and a programming charge to configure the Diamond’s firmware. The remaining costs are the standard per-unit charge for supply of the readers (see Diamond details), and whatever fitting costs are incurred.