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Comment by quadrature | Hacker News Reader

And yet it still doesn't work in Canada which adopted the technology ahead of the US and has a much wider roll out.

Adopted what technology? Canada has had chip tech and tap-to-pay tech in their various debit and credit cards for a while but I've never seen tap-to-pay work with a phone here in Canada. On top of that, Google Wallet has not yet been rolled out to work in Canada or internationally for that matter, even with their physical Google Wallet cards. If you attempt to make a purchase with the physical card, it will be declined and you'll receive a notification saying that international (non-US) purchases are not supported. Apple Pay additionally does not work in Canada. Given the first point made, there's no reason for them to activate it soon anyway because our hardware won't work out of the gate regardless.

Do you have any info on the hardware incompatibility ?. I always assumed that mobile payments were meant to work with those existing NFC POS terminals.

What?

Google Wallet not working is completely on Google/the issuing bank. That is entirely a software limitation. If you try using the NFC on the phone and it tells you it's not available internationally, then there's clearly no hardware incompatibility, it's just Google not supporting international transactions.

Apple Pay not rolling out is also, similarly, because Apple is not ready to roll out in Canada, it's entirely software-based. I had my iPhone region set to Canada (I guess I never switched when I moved down) and I couldn't access the settings. Once I switched to US, bam, there it was. There have already been people who confirmed[1] that Apple Pay works perfectly fine in Canada.

NFC transactions are standardized, there is no "hardware won't work" because the entire point of the standard is that it will work. The incompatibilities are completely arbitrary, it's the respective companies not wanting to expand to Canada yet and using software to disable or limit the transactions based on transaction location.

[1]: http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/how-to-use-apple-pay-in-canada...

Posted down-thread as well, but Google Wallet worked in Canada when it first launched. It wouldn't accept a Canadian address, but you could pay if you could get money onto the prepaid card. They added progressively more limitations, until eventually it started erroring at Canadian merchants. It's completely on Google, there's no technical incompatibility.

Apple Pay does work in Canada, but it only works with American credit cards. I use it in Canada all the time.

Or in Australia, I managed to work around the geo-blocking and get it to work awhile ago but was too unstable at the time to be worth using it.

Australia has been using chip and pin for years now and most (majority) or retailers have "Tap and go" readers at the checkout.

Seems like all they need to do is remove the geo restriction and they would be good to go

AFAIK, Canada's "flash payments" use incompatible physical-layer standards. To make it work, you'd need a phone with two NFC radios in it.

Since phones with both GSM and CDMA radios are extremely recent—despite the need being obvious for a very long time—I doubt we'll see hybrid-radio NFC designs any time soon.

Do you have a source for this?, I found a list [1] of handsets that are compatible with Visa paywave which i see around a lot. It suggests that at least some handsets are capable of interfacing with existing NFC terminals.

[1] https://technologypartner.visa.com/Download.aspx?id=188

Do you mean Interac Flash? Because that's EMV[1], just like Visa's PayWave, MC's PayPass, etc. They're all interchangeable, and they all use the same standard. There's no two radios needed. Plus, most NFC terminals in Canada were first built for PayWave/PayPass, so it would be stupid for them to try and go in a completely separate direction for debit NFC transactions.

[1]: http://www.interac.ca/en/press-releases/mobile-debit-eng under "About mobile Interac Flash"

Nope. I had Google Wallet working on my Neuxs S in Canada two years ago, you can use it at any Tim Hortons ;)

Canadian banks do support their own mobile wallets (similar to the ISIS model), but only on a few cherry-picked devices, and with a custom SIM. See http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/mobile/wallet/

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