Why is radio frequency identification perceived to be deploying at a slower pace than some in the industry thought would occur?
Actually, the whole sector of RFID deliverables is doing very well, considering the economic recession and a downturn in demand.
Despite a lack of funding, the industry has remained on track with the pace of innovation and, in fact, there is more change in RFID, and a lot more hope, than ever reached Washington, D.C.
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However, so long as the analyst sector, the delivery sector and end users are confused by the term RFID being considered to reflect the pace of passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) technology, then the industry has a perception, and reporting, problem. There is no doubt that the pervasive use of UHF has been helped by the ISO 18000-6C standard and, in Asia, the ISO 18000-6B standard, and from this success, there has been a wider range of adopting industries, not all of which take the Electronic Product Code (EPC) umbrella as a mandatory implementation model for UHF.
RFID Journal takes great pains to illustrate and typify all forms of RFID implementation, and is a valuable thermometer for the pace of adoption and change. There is one service that we must try to obtain: that of reporting on “fit for purpose” adoption, rather than “fit for press release” implementations. “Fit for press release” RFID implementations rarely provide any reference material for industry advancement and ease of adoption. I shudder each time I read such press releases, knowing that the claims made, or the adoption portrayed, could—and should—be accomplished with a different frequency, protocol or technology. It is sad that in a small survey of three past issues of the most-read RFID material, one can find that these announcements led nowhere, and caused only obfuscation and confusion in the buying community, as well as failing to continue into long-term use.
There are other challenges to explain why the adoption curve has not matched predictive press.
The first, and foremost, reason is that the people who drew pictures of a rosy and straightforward deployment were largely those who needed such a picture in order to induce investors.
Secondly, the GTAG (Global Tag) standardization initiative of the Uniform Code Council (UCC) and the European Article Numbering Association (EAN) published an internal paper in June 2000 that identified that the key component of successful RFID at any frequency, in any application, would be the need for people to make it, integrate it and—probably most important of all—screw the apparatus to the wall.
Experienced field operatives were rare. Joe Leone—at that time, working at Matrics—was one of only a handful of individuals with deployment experience. This is still the case, for there has never been, especially in the UHF field, a deployment engineer course. (Please do not quote the offerings that do exist, as they are classroom-based. Experience in RFID is unique to site, and built up over deployment experience, not by reading books.) The resources applied today are still feeling in the dark for success and, most importantly, for ease of deployment. There are still too many UHF proposals that fail at implementation, due to the artifacts’ crudeness and the lack of sophistication in both the buyer and the deliverer.
There can be no surprise that the majority of installations today, particularly in the United States, look more like Fred Karno’s circus than a professional install, and this also leads to the general perception of a lack of professional competency in the industry. Plant managers, DC operators and retailers, airport facility managers and personnel at secure facilities consider the installation “temporary.” We must face up to this fact, and extend the deployment into the proper type of conduit, and the better maintenance profiles. When you see, all too often, antennas coated in dust, Kit Kat wrappers and cigarette ends—yes, this has been seen at more than one installation site—it becomes clear that the installation and the technology are not respected.
GTAG had considered a certification program for installers, but had recognized that no two installations are the same, no two application environments identical, and that each environment offers its own unique challenges to an installer.
Thirdly, the tsunami of failed deliverables grew faster than the success stories, even though the failures were centered around passive UHF—and, in most cases, were the result of a lack of due diligence on the buyer’s part, as well as a duplicitous channel to market by the vendor. The impact was felt mainly by the passive UHF market. The advent of the notion of EPC technology simply compounded the vision, portraying as it did an even more complex and expensive investment path.
EPC is a superb tool—one that, over time, will become the normative numbering methodology, and IT infrastructure, for some industry sectors and applications (though not all). The need for an Electronic Product Code that has portability over all mediums—and, in particular, across all geographies—is fundamental, and the work of ETSI, CEN and GS1 in this area, under the ICT banner, is evidence of just how fast this window, and risk, is opening to abuse and a lack of standards.
Fourthly, standards became the holy grail—no standard, no way. While standards can be useful in advancing an industry or creating interoperability, they are not the solution, nor the reason, for application or deployment failure. Standards describe, they should not prescribe—and if they do, then the result is failure.
Now, in 2010, a decade after the great beginning—the one-cent tag, the painless ultra-low-cost miracle—we are faced with significant challenges, a collision of outcomes that will prove to be both the worst and best of times for some parties.
Some issues that require recognition, acceptance and addressing by the industry and users include:
1. Radio technologies are converging faster than was initially considered. The prohibitive framework that looked like a market-protection system (namely, radio regulation) has largely taken a back seat since the turn of the century—and, in fact, has contributed, with rapid advancements in non-interfering deliverables, to the convergence of technologies and the rapid adoption in the consumer-empowerment channels.
2. Active technology, with advances in battery deliverables, a lower cost of ownership and a simpler deployment model, has negatively impacted passive deliverables.
3. Both high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) deliverables have made significant inroads in the use models. HF use is an everyday growth story, and the stability of the source manufacturers in both LF and HF has led to increased adoption.
4. UHF has success stories that are increasingly found in closed-loop systems in which the EPC link is not being adopted, and the implemented cost, or establishment cost, is thus greatly reduced. This principle of an open, frequency-aligned deliverable, available to every industry no matter the data mode, is the model that GTAG created.
5. We must address the need for real-time location system (RTLS) deliverables in small spaces, and this need is being understood. The reality is that warehouse management system (WMS) positioning can create the same environment as a passive RFID system, in real time and in real space.
In conclusion, I see that the financial constraints of the past 30 months are loosening, and that investment monies are available, albeit with stricter ties and heavier costs. The cycle of time in which an innovator in wireless and radio technology can recover its investment, however, has shortened considerably.
I estimate, and my banking and market analyst friends concur, that the span from prototype to market must be less than one year, and that the market freshness and margin-protected timeline is no more than two years.
The age of portal reading in passive UHF—as brief as it was, from 1998 to 2008—is now over. Portal reading is under challenge from broad-array-antenna deliverables (see RFID 2.0). Read range is accelerating, as both tag and reader deliverables improve, very much in keeping with my timeline above for innovation to reach market, prove itself and be widely adopted.
The purpose and use of a handheld interrogator in UHF deliverables has always escaped me, though I accept that at this time, the accelerated reduction in the cost of a handheld—and the reality that these devices allow for the use of bar codes as a fallback or confirming identifier—is likely to continue handheld use for the near future. The implementation of broad-array antennas, as well as the inevitable advances to complement the use of the broad array by adding 360-degree bar-code visibility, will, in due course, render the practical need for such instruments moot.
The expansion of 13.56 MHz HF deliverables has been adeptly managed by the chip houses and label makers, and has been used to great advantage in the increasing delivery of consumer-empowerment tools, based on mobile telephony and welcomed by carriers that have not only utilized the now rapidly emerging (albeit, after at least one false start) Near Field Communication (NFC) applications, but also added bar-code scanning competency as a consumer empowerment.
The increasing use of HF deliverables in the leisure sector, sports facilities, the public transport sector, medical record cards and secure cashless payments bodes well for the continued embedding of these deliverables. However, the pace of adoption has also led to the commoditization of all elements at a rapid pace.
RFID, the entire spectrum of deliverable short-range device innovation and adoption, is doing nicely, but it could do better—especially in the areas of installation and integration.
As an industry, we can take some comfort from the realization that in the past 10 years—the first decade of the 21st century—our industry has brought ease and convenience to consumers, improved the bottom line to business (except our own!) and advanced the use of RFID into many hitherto unconsidered applications.
There are pressing matters that need to be addressed. And these matters are not for a standards body, or a regulator, to decide on—they are for an industry body… AIM, where are you?
John Greaves is a 20-year veteran of the RFID and automatic-identification industries. He was the founding chair of the U.S. RFID standards group, led the European Spectrum Initiative, and headed EAN.UCC’s GTAG program. Greaves has served with distinction in the standards and equipment-regulation bodies ETSI, CEPT, CEN and ISO, and is currently a director of the LPRA (Low Power Radio Association) Council, and a member of the Institute of Logistics, CIES, ICSC and the CSCMP (Council for Supply Chain Management Professionals).