| 摘要 |
The present invention relates to improvements in or relating to pre-payment facilities, and is more particularly, although not exclusively, concerned with pre-payment of utility meters. Pre-payment systems have existed in many forms for a number of years. Early card or ticket meters were non-meter specific and typically comprised pre-encoded multi-value tokens with magnetic strips. These were inherently insecure with a lack of encryption and did into provide any data for the utility companies. Later magnetic card meters improved upon security with basic encryption and meter-specific tokens being employed. Key meters were subsequently developed where a non-volatile circuit memory device was integrated in a plastic key. Tokens were re-usable but were expensive and sometimes susceptible to static electricity but they did provide two-way data transfer whereby utility companies could make reasonable statistical analysis of customer use habits. Smart cards, or so-called memory cards, have been employed which have a silicon chip embedded into a credit card style card. The present invention provides a pre-payment system comprising a commodity supply network, including a network of point-of-sale terminals, consumer commodity terminal operable to control a supply of the commodity, wherein the point-of-sale terminals and the commodity supply network are linked by a two-way communications link, and wherein the point-of-sale terminals and the consumer commodity terminals are operable to receive smart cards. |
