Subject: [NEXTEL-1] The New Era of Wireless Tracking

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 22:23:55 -0400

The New Eraof Wireless Tracking
By Vincent Ryan
NewsFactor Network
July 30, 2003

Want to find out where your dog wandered off to after you left the fence
gate open or in which nightclub you left your $500 bag? Wireless tracking is
here. Well, almost. Several small vendors are working on technologies and
networks that will enable consumer and commercial usage of wireless tracking
beyond global positioning systems. Such technology is already in use in
identification tags in department stores and in highway collection booths
that let drivers bypass cash lanes.
But the latest developments in wireless tracking will allow more data to be
transmitted between a "tag" and a reader and provide a greater range of
coverage: The tagged item can be a mile or two away to be read as opposed to
just a few feet. That will open the door to new applications.

Whether companies and consumers will adopt the technology is another
question. Skeptics say it will take awhile before the small vendors working
on this technology reap the fruits of their labor.

Woz is back
A promising venture from Steve Wozniak called "Wheels of Zeus"
(http://www.woz.com/) is creating a wireless platform that consists of a
system reference design, a wireless network, and an online service that will
enable solutions in wireless location-monitoring technology. At the heart of
the wOz platform is wOzNet, a low-power network that operates in the 900 Mhz
spectrum, the same radio frequency used by some cordless phones.

Using radio signal and global positioning satellite data, wOzNet will be
able to track tagged items within a one to two-mile radius, Gina Clark, vice
president of marketing and business development for Wheels of Zeus, told
NewsFactor. The tracking device, or base station, will also be mobile, and
tags will be able to generate alerts, such as when a pet leaves a designated
area. The tracking devices will have a long battery life-one to two years
depending on the application, Clark said.

Wheels of Zeus will just be developing the reference design for the network;
Licensees will develop the hardware and software and sell products to end
users. Zeus reportedly already has agreements with two large American
consumer electronics companies.

The intent is for wOzNet to be a long-range network, with multiple base
stations in an area connecting over a peer-to-peer network to enable
tracking beyond two miles. Long range requires the network to "grow
organically" with the purchase of devices by end users, or it will require
partners to place tracking devices in public places. "One of the challenges
is to work with partners closely to get the network in place as quickly as
possible, so area and range expands quickly," Clark said.

Wheels of Zeus also is trying to keep down the cost of the network. There
will be no carrier fees, for example. The final cost to the end user would
be up to wOz's partners. "Whether something is expensive or not depends on
what you put the tag on," Clark said. "If I am buying this tag for my child,
cat, or laptop, my pricing curve is a little bit higher. I might pay a
little bit more."

Wheels of Zeus plans to unveil the wOz platform and wOzNet in the first half
of 2004.

Radio identification

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is another wireless
tracking system gaining some traction. RFID tranfers data between a wireless
transponder tag and a reader and already is used in many applications,
including retail stores and highway toll-collection booths. Savi Technology,
a provider of RFID readers and software, provides technology to the U.S.
Department of Defense's Total Asset Visibility network,
(http://www.defenselink.mil/acq/jtav/index.htm) the largest RFID cargo
tracking system in the world. The network is in 750 locations in 40
countries.

Mark Nelson, a spokesperson for Savi Technology, said RFID technology was
critical in the rapid deployment of military supplies for Operation Iraqi
freedom and the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Bosnia. The military
started using the technology in conflict situations after a huge problem in
the Gulf War in which the military shipped 30,000 containers and field
troops had no idea what was inside them. It took troops three or four days
to find the container containing the ammunition and food they needed, Nelson
said. In the more recent conflicts, that was reduced to minutes.

The U.S. military application uses active RFID tags, which are different
from the passive RFID tags used in most retail operations. Active RFID tags
are really minicomputers with integrated circuitry, memory and radio
antennae. The tags, which are usually the size of a deck of cards and cost
more, can transmit information such as the contents, or manifest, of a
container, the container's location, and the time. They also have a read
range of more than 300 feet.

"You get a firehose of data from these tags -- if you have hundreds of
thousands of items coming through a storage yard or warehouse, all the data
transmitted can overwhelm a software system not properly set up," Nelson
said.

Commercial Dead Ends

In the commercial sector, a homeland security initiative by the DoD called
"Smart and Secure Trade Lanes"
(http://www.scst.info/index.html) is using RFID tags with a special form
factor that contains a locking mechanism. The tag transmits an alert when
the locking mechanism has been tampered with. The three largest shipping
companies in the U.S., which control 70 percent of all container imports,
are using the technology, Nelson said.

Other areas of the commercial sector are implementing RFID technology to
meet a variety of needs in supply-chain management. In an attempt to reduce
internal theft, British retailer Woolworth's is using active RFID to track
the trail of products from distribution centers to retail outlets. The tags
are put on dollies and transmit data about when a shipment arrives at and
leaves a specific checkpoint. The tags also can communicate with the bar
codes on individual product boxes.

Overall, the commercial sector has been slow to adopt RFID and other
wireless-tracking technologies, though. Wal-Mart, for instance, recently
backed off a requirement that by 2005, its top 100 suppliers put passive
RFID tags on all pallets and cases.

"The technology has been around for a long time," but many commercial
projects have "ended up as dead ends," Nelson said. "The price of tags has
been a little too high for [RFID] to be commercially adopted on a wide
scale." Other barriers to adoption include a lack of international
standards. "Different kinds of RFID technologies are not able to communicate
with each other," Nelson said.

Integration nightmares

Ken Smiley, director at Forrester Research, said several of his clients are
discussing using RFID tags to improve business processes, but many are
sitting on the sidelines waiting for the wireless tracking ecosystem and
technology to mature. "The technologies are not in place everywhere and
don't tie to other systems yet," Smiley said. Currently, an enterprise would
have to buy separate software, servers and other devices, and manage and
integrate them into existing systems, Smiley said.

Companies wanting to implement the technology at multiple points in the
supply chain also face obstacles, Smiley said. "Am I tagging the pallets,
the widgets, or both? At what point of the manufacturing process does that
come into play?" Unless a company controls manufacturing end-to-end, it may
have to get suppliers and other third parties to agree on standards and
implementations, he said.

In short, wireless tracking is a great idea, but like many technologies it
could easily fall prey to the politics and agendas of vendors.

http://www.wirelessnewsfactor.com/perl/story/22001.html

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