System uses near-field communications to recognize a smartphone user when app access is difficult

It’s a situation no EV owner wants:  arriving at a charging station in a parking garage, only to find there’s no cellular or Wi-Fi service to access the network app. Without the ability to begin charging, or even call the charging provider, you’ve got no choice but to wait or find another local charger. 

Charging network company SWTCH Energy may have found a solution. Its latest technology, SWTCH Tap, takes public cellular or Wi-Fi connectivity out of the equation when it matters most.

NFC is the answer

Thomas Martin, director of sales engineering at SWTCH, presented the new technology this week at the EV & Charging Expo in Toronto. “One of the biggest reasons we thought of this was, time and time again, we come across projects where we have our solution,” he says. “It’s all the highest-tech stuff, it’s brand new, it’s great, but the user doesn’t have cell phone connectivity in the basement, and that’s not necessarily a problem we can solve. 

“And so we thought of many different ways, such as allowing users to piggyback off of our comms infrastructure. That gets very expensive. 

“And then once we kind of put all the pieces together, realizing we can use NFC (near-field communications) to kind of bridge the gap between the phone and the charger to verify that it’s you.”

NFC is how your smartphone taps for contactless payments, using short-range wireless signals. The idea behind the system is that the SWTCH chargers run on a  dedicated Wi-Fi service, and they are already NFC-equipped, so no new equipment is required. 

Uninterrupted service

In the event of limited public cellular or Wi-Fi access, the user would tap their phone on the charger. The units would recognize the SWTCH account via the phone’s credentials and access the user’s account over their own secure Wi-Fi connectivity. 

SWTCH Tap will even work in the event of a total service blackout. The charger would use local intelligence, such as cached user IDs, to authorize a session. Once connectivity is restored, the user’s transaction data would sync back with the network. 

This model not only makes it easier for EV owners, but it also ensures charger owners can offer uninterrupted service.

A first step

“The overall goal here is to make it easier to charge,” says Martin. “In our data, more than 80 per cent of people are using the app as the method to authenticate a charger. And so that tells us that’s what people like. Although we do issue RFID cards to a lot of people, the app is by far number one.”

While admitting he can’t go into detail, Martin hints that this is only the first step in a new approach to customer access for SWTCH chargers. 

“I can say this is the start of, kind of a new branch of technology that we’re building. So there is more to come. This is kind of the start of a user experience 2.0 kind of path we’re taking.”

SWTCH Tap is on display at the EV & Charging Expo 2026 in Toronto, April 8-9.