Elektrobit Debuts RFID Products

By Rhea Wessel

Nov. 29, 2006—Finnish wireless-technology firm Elektrobit debuted its first RFID products today at the ID World 2006 conference in Milan. The company says it aims to become a leading global provider of RFID reader systems.

Elektrobit has performed research and development for the RFID market for the past 10 years. To date, it says it has held back from launching any products because it believed the RFID market was developing too slowly. That, however, is no longer the case.

Elektrobit's J.T. Bergqvist

"We see a clear change in the market picture," says J.T. Bergqvist, chairman of the board at Elektrobit and a former high-ranking official at Nokia. "With the standardization of UHF and EPC Gen 2, we see a major opportunity to enter the commercial RFID market after so many years in R&D services."

According to Bergqvist, other problems—such as the scarcity of spectrum in Europe and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) "listen before talk" requirement (see Interrogators Designed for the European Set)—have made it difficult for companies to install UHF readers on a wide scale. ETSI is a nonprofit organization responsible for the standards development of information and communications technologies within the European Union (EU).

ETSI, as well as several RFID vendors and users, has been studying ways to facilitate large-scale UHF RFID deployment (see ETSI Tests Show EPC Scaleable in Europe). Elektrobit is a member of both ETSI and EPCglobal, an organization leading the development of industry-driven standards for the Electronic Product Code (EPC).

Elektrobit's new Identification Network Architecture is designed to address all these problems, the company says, serving as an efficient tool for large RFID installations in Europe.