Europe Gets Serious About EPC

By Mark Roberti

Oct. 30, 2006—Europe has yet to jump on the Electronic Product Code bandwagon the way companies in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Asia have. However, if our RFID Journal LIVE! Europe event last week was any indication, Europe is getting serious about embracing EPC. Attendees were knowledgeable, engaging in discussions with speakers and other attendees, and interested in potential supply-chain and logistics applications.

There are a number of reasons why the mood at this year's event was more focused on the potential of EPC to deliver value. New ultrahigh-frequency interrogators (readers) based on the second generation EPC protocol now work with new, relaxed regulations proposed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In a panel discussion I hosted, Christian Plenge, RFID project lead for Metro Group International (MGI), said the performance of ETSI-compliant UHF EPC interrogators was better than expected. "The problem now is not being unable to read tags," he said. "It is reading tags on items that are not on the forklift but on a nearby shelf."


European companies have been reluctant to adopt UHF EPC because the performance of Gen 1 EPC systems under old ETSI rules was not good enough. ETSI has made more bandwidth in the UHF spectrum available for RFID systems, and it has allowed interrogators to emit more power, making it possible to read passive UHF tags from farther away. The UHF Gen 2 protocol was also optimized to work well around the world, not just in the United States. The improved performance of UHF systems means European companies can now read tags at longer range in warehouse and supply-chain operations. Companies are even looking at tagging shipping containers with passive tags.

Another reason European companies are more focused on EPC technology is that there are more examples of companies that have done pilots or actual rollouts using UHF EPC systems that show a clear return on investment. During the conference, a number of speakers talked about the benefits they are seeing. Plenge said Metro could save up to $8 million in Germany just from automating the process of receiving pallets, for instance. Among the other companies that made compelling presentations were TNT Express, a logistics company that is tracking goods from Asia to Europe with RFID; BGN, a large Dutch bookseller tagging every book in one of its stores; and KPN, a Dutch phone company that is applying RFID tags to the packaging of individual mobile phones (the tags are removed at point of sale).