India allocates UHF for RFID

The Wireless Planning and Development Authority of the
Government of India has freed up radio frequency in the UHF 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% 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, VC 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."

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