India allocates UHF for RFID

BANGALORE: The Wireless Planning and Development Authority of the Government of India has freed up radio frequency in the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) 865-867 MHz band.

The notification has come in the wake of global developments wherein radio frequency is being allocated within 860-960 MHz for operating mission-critical supply chain applications across industry segments such as pharmaceuticals, retail, aerospace, FMCG and automotive and defence.

Speaking at the Texas Instruments Developer Conference, Prateep Misra, Manager-RFID Solutions, Tata Consultancy Services said, “RFID has graduated from being a futuristic concept to reality. The EPC Gen 2 tag standard has been ratified and products are now commercially available. Indian market is also looking into the RFID technology albeit in a closed loop environment. It's high on the CIO agenda and interest from the VC community is also growing.”

He said that 67 percent of the global countries have accepted global standard in RFID and India is one of them, which is proactively involved in promoting the concept. Recently it got a major boost with the Government of India freeing up the radio frequency range of UHF 865-867 MHz band. However there is more to technology than the hype, he said.

There are quite a few challenges to adopt the technology in an aggressive manner and is limited by regulatory requirements, cost Vs performance and integration issues. In fact, integration costs have hindered large-scale adoption, he opined.

Agreeing with him, V.C Kumar, Emerging Markets Manager, RFID Systems, TI, said, “ Standardization is still a contentious issue which is yet to evolve a globally interoperable protocol for a global economy. Added to it is the implementation costs, which is yet to demonstrate ROI, value across the value chain. Data privacy and security issues are still evolving in Asia and tech maturity-that consumer acceptance of a contactless technology is yet to be reached. “

A.R. Girish, Head, Solution Development and Delivery, Infosys, said, “ Though there are many protocols on RFID is being deployed like 14443, EPC (Electronic Product Code) standard is heralding the coming of age of RFID from an enterprise adoption standard similar to the TCP/IP standard protocol which enabled Internet access across the globe.”

Speaking about the future scope of this technology, he said that RFID could bring about a revolution in technology, which can enable an object that “ Talks” to an object that can “Think”. RFID can be deployed in smart objectives, telematics and near field communication (NFC). The NFC concept is taking off in a major way in certain advanced countries like Germany, France and US.

The standardization for the NFC is being evolved and it might take 2-3 years for this concept to take off in a big way across the globe. Pilots are being run in Germany in their mass transit operations where ticket booking and route schedules can be checked using cell phones and US is trying with ePayment modes, he said.