The cards work on all three but the products on them, like a Network Freedom is only available on Bluestar and Wilts and Dorset, not Southern Vectis, they have their own ticketing.
Yes, but any ticket from any of the three is technically and theoretically able to be loaded on them. You can have the distinct products put on as it's all under the same OID, as opposed to the difficulty when you're crossing between OIDs.
There's a 'shell' and 'product owner' OID, more detail is in the spec.
You can only top up tickets on the bus, you cannot buy a new one. You would have to go to the Bluestar box at Bargate or the equivalent places for W&D/IoW to get a new product, even then I think they give out a whole new card.
The initial implementation on the W&D side allowed IPE creation on the buses for carnet products, from personal experience. The way it works now is that the IPE that is on the shell is "topped up".
Shouldn't be a need, from what I've seen most of the Go-Ahead group companies make use of a Retail POST that is able to provision new products on. I've not been to the box at Bargate but the Retail POSTs can create/amend/delete IPEs.
I feared this, after the comments earlier. Can you think of a reason why they would choose to configure like this?
So if one of the groups can't co-ordinate successfully internally, what chance is there of being able to load a stagecoach product on a card issued by First
(Not that first have really embraced ITSO yet)
The ITSO specification makes reference to commercial agreements in order to facilitate cross-acceptance of operator products. There's also a customer support problem, who do they contact? Say you have a shell issued by Stagecoach which contains a product loaded by, say, First... the obvious one would be Stagecoach as their support number is on there - but they can't touch the product...
There's also competition legislation that needs to be considered, which leads to the ticketing block exemption for multi-operator tickets. More details (for those who don't know about it - I'm sure you do!) is available on the OFT website and is the basis for PlusBus, Oxford SmartZone, etc.
There is something in the 'future' in the form of SEFT - but I can't really say anything more than that...
Surely it was obvious that the industry could not be trusted to collaborate to have a unified smartcard? The Dutch PT industry is now much more fragmented than it used to be with a variety of state, municipal and private owners yet they mandated that the same smartcard would be valid on all companies in the country.
What you describe is what ITSO facilitates. It is up to the commercial operators of public transport to implement it in full.
I notice that the Southern website offers smartcard season tickets from Brighton Mainline stations to Victoria for start dates from 2 January. Has that been announced yet?
First public interaction stage of ITSO on Prestige, finally, by the sounds of that!
[disclosure: I worked for ITSO over the Summer looking at this problem, and others]
