May 07, 2012—Providers of passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification systems often boast read rates of 99.8 percent, or a similar statistic just below 100 percent. But this simple number can be highly misleading, leading to distrust among potential customers hoping to employ the technology to improve the way they do business.

Let's assume that we push 10,000 pallets containing tagged products through an RFID portal. Every time that a pallet is moved through the portal, multiple read events are created. Sometimes, depending on the particular product, the read rate—or performance—will not reach 100 percent, meaning that not all products have been identified.

Now, let's say that we reach an overall average reading performance of 99.8 percent for the 10,000 pallets—due to the material of the product being tagged, the portal's setup or simply the nature of radio waves. The problem is that RFID systems vendors are publicizing only the overall average read rates, thereby leading some potential end users to wrongly believe either that passive UHF RFID technology is not sufficiently reliable and cannot be used to automate many tasks, or that it is reliable enough to automate certain tasks.

So let's assume that a company wished to utilize passive UHF RFID technology to automate processes and reduce labor costs. The firm would need to achieve 100 percent reading performance in order to be able to deploy such a solution. The problem is that when 10,000 pallets are being read in this hypothetical example, a 100 percent read rate might have been achieved for 9,900 of those pallets, while only 80 percent was achieved for the other 100. The overall read rate would be 99.8 percent, but the end user would need to manually read tags on only 100 pallets in order to interrogate every tag.

That might be acceptable to the end-user company, but what if the read rate were 100 percent for 5,000 pallets, and only 99.6 percent for the remaining 5,000? The overall read rate would still be 99.8 percent, but the end user would need to manually read tags using a handheld interrogator on 50 percent of all pallets moving through the portal, in order to achieve a 100 percent read rate. Clearly, this would be unacceptable.

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The Truth About RFID Read Rates

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