Are there are resultant performance problems when there are 1,000 tags within a real field?
—Name withheld
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There is no problem reading large concentrations of tags. The air-interface protocols have anticollission algorithms enabling readers to communicate very rapidly with individual tags within a read field. In the following video, NXP Semiconductors demonstrates how 96 tags on vials of drugs were all read in matter of a few seconds:
Capturing Serialized Data on 96 Drug Vials.
High-frequency (HF) tags in random orientation can also be read quickly. However, there are times when the antennas of two tags could touch each other, detuning the antennas and thereby preventing the tags from being read. And a tag can sometimes shield another tag, preventing energy from reading tags behind it. So it is difficult to generalize and say that every tag can always be read when there are dozens or hundreds of tags in a read field.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal