Watching certain technologies for growth and maturity is something that we spend significant energy doing in our company. It used to be that we were watching passive RFID, waiting for it to mature to the point where most of our customers could use it. That is use it without excessive costs, and complexity that would kill almost every possible project that could use of the technology.
That is about where we are with real time locating systems. We have solutions for indoor tracking, but they are expensive and complex, meaning that only a few applications can cost justify the project.
Let’s first break this down into indoor versus outdoor applications. And let’s open the conversation with everyone’s immediate reaction to this technology. We have Wi-Fi and Cellular technology that can do locating now, why isn’t there a simple and inexpensive solution for both indoor and outdoor locating that just plugs and plays? Our cell phones can do this already.
Indoors is obviously easier to do and has more existing solutions. Zebra’s WhereNet is the solution that we currently offer. And technically this will work both indoor and outdoor, but not everywhere outdoors, only within a range in which you have set up the antennas for the tags to triangulate from. And there are many technologies within this product offering. Bluetooth low energy, Ultra Wide Band, even passive RFID can feed information into the locating engine that tracks where hardware is located.
But you must put expensive tags on every asset that you want to track. Then you must put up the reader network to triangulate and locate the tags. Then there are the servers that you need to do the processing of location and asset data on premises. Finally, there is the software needed to do the locating, notifying, reporting and back-end tie into existing software. If that list sounded expensive and complex, it is both.
But can’t you do inexpensive passive RFID tags to do the locating? Sort of. As a rule, passive RFID will only tell you the last time that a fixed or mobile reader saw the RFID tag, and where that was. Realtime locating means that the tags are needed to be powered and active, frequently transmitting to the reader so that the tags’ location is constantly updated.
Some headway is being made around the indoor locating of assets. Zebra has the ATR7000, which will locate passive tags in a small area, but there is still a lot of software to build out to use this product. SOTI, our MDM software product offering, is introducing a Wi-Fi based locating product for indoor tracking of Mobile Computers. This doesn’t help with tracking assets or high dollar products but does help customers keep track of their very valuable mobile computing assets.
For outdoor RTLS, the WhereNet product from Zebra, is the best that we have so far. You can track assets in an area of about a square mile with this technology, but it comes as a pretty steep price. Customers ask us about Apple AirTags being used for outdoor locating. We find ourselves explaining the limitations of the AirTags (and Tile Tags for that matter) and the fact that they need to be in range of someone’s iPhone to do locating. Also, the iPhones must have had the locating feature enabled. Finally, this is a public network, so your information is not very secure.
We are still searching the industry for better indoor and outdoor locating solutions, and hoping to have better offerings in the near future for our customers.
If you are looking for a technology partner that isn’t just in it for the short term, but is investing long term in the technology and services to best serve our customers, visit us at www.emptechgroup.com to learn more.