(Yicai Global) Dec. 20 -- Telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies and the world's largest bank card issuer China UnionPay are teaming up to offer contactless payment services for electric vehicle charging piles.

Huawei will use power-line carrier communication, the Internet of Things and edge computing technology to process the payments, digital product data site IT168 cited Huawei as saying yesterday.

Conventional payment systems need costly telecoms lines and the payment procedures are trouble, leading to unhappy customers, China UnionPay said, adding that they also pose risk in that payments are not uniformly supervised.

The charging piles will automatically send vehicle and user information to an edge computing gateway in real time when the user charges their vehicle. The edge gateway will then send settlement information to China UnionPay's IoT platform, which will create an order and complete the transaction when the user returns the charger.

The two firms revealed the technology at a conference celebrating the founding of the PLC-IOT alliance in Dongguan, Guangdong province yesterday. The alliance has 73 founding members involved in the power, transport, finance and firefighting sectors. PLC-IOT is a wired-wireless technology with broad application prospects as it enables stable, fast data transmission over long distances.

Editor: James Boynton