What Kind of Bandwidth does NFC Provide?

Question

I'm looking into starting some projects with Android and NFC. What kind of bandwidth does NFC provide? This is assuming I had a suitable NFC reader/writer attached to an Arduino or similar, and that was communicating with an Android device held in contact with it. Lots of people suggest to initiate the communication with NFC and then do the actual data transfer via Bluetooth, but I'm wondering the bandwidth available for strictly NFC communication, just out of curiosity.

Answer 1

I think it depends on the chipset and tag combination. It could be 106 kb/s, 212 kb/s, or 424 kb/s. I'm not sure how to determine what the transfer speed is through the Android APIs or even what speeds Android supports.

In addition to the low bandwidth constraints, you should avoid non-trivial nfc transfers simply because the connection is broken when the devices physically separate.

http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/wireless/nfc/near-field-communications-tags-types.php

Answer 2

NFC supports 106/212/424 kbit/s. Apparently there are 848 kbit/s cards also, but they're not compliant with the standard.

That being said, the speed you'll get in the real world depends on the device/card you're using. It's not all that fast in reality.

Another reason for using bluetooth for the actual transfer is proximity. Bluetooth has a much better range than NFC. NFC's range is pitiful, simply put. For an NFC-only transfer, you'd have to make sure the devices were very close the entire time(and preferably not moving). For NFC hand-off to bluetooth, you just have to tap them for a half-second or so, and then it doesn't matter if they move around the room.

Now, if you're just talking about sending a few kilos here and there, it's not a problem.

Answer 3

From Wikipedia

Supported data rates: 106, 212 or 424 kbit/s (the bit rate 848 kbit/s is not compliant with the standard ISO/IEC 18092)

Answer 4

106, 212 or 424 kbit/s are supported. But in reality and based on real life experience, it is really much lower than that.

Answer 5

The supported data-rates of the air-interface are one thing. The data-rate that you see after removing protocol overhead, waiting for eeprom writes and all the other stuff that takes time is a whole different story.

Long story short, the practical data-rate when reading from a tag or doing peer-to-peer transfers peaks around 2.5 kilobyte/second.

And depending on specific tags or the peer technology it can be a lot slower than that.