Setting the RuBee Record Straight
Ever since the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers announced that it was making the RuBee protocol a standard, many news stories have been proclaiming that the technology is better than radio frequency identification. One report even went so far as to say it could spell doom for RFID. There's only one problem: RuBee is RFID.

Visible Assets, the small firm in Miami that developed RuBee, named the protocol, tags and interrogators after the Rolling Stones' 1967 hit song "Ruby Tuesday." The RuBee tag functions at a low frequency (132 kHz), which gives it different capabilities compared with RFID tags that operate at high (13.56-MHz) and ultrahigh (856- to 960-MHz) frequencies.

The RuBee tag functions at a low frequency, which gives it different capabilities compared with RFID tags that operate at high and ultrahigh frequencies.

At low frequency, data is carried via magnetic induction in the near field, which makes it more RF-friendly to products with metal or liquids. (With magnetic induction, the interrogator antenna generates an alternating magnetic field from a coil of wire. The tag also has a coil of wire that induces current from the magnetic field.)

But while RuBee tags can be read more reliably than any UHF tag placed on, say, a pallet of bottled water or canned foods, low frequency has slower data-transfer speeds than UHF. This means that only a handful of tags can be read per second. Plus, because the tag is battery-powered (a passive version is in development), it's not disposable and is considerably more expensive than passive UHF tags, making it a poor fit for the fast-moving supply chain.

Some end users might find RuBee an alternative to active (battery-powered) UHF tags used for tracking assets—if the assets contain liquids or metal and don't need to be read quickly. "RuBee is just one more tool in our toolbox to provide visibility for the enterprise," says Toby Rush, president of Rush Tracking Systems, a systems integrator that is working with Visible Assets on some RuBee deployments.