The Booming Business of Active RFID and RTLS

By Dr. Peter Harrop, chairman, IDTechEx

The RFID business is quintupling in value in the next ten years but the Active RFID business is growing about ten times, driven by such business as the $475 million military order currently being serviced by Savi Technology and innovations such as the first 100,000 Active RFID labels from Power ID with greatly enhanced range over passive alternatives. Within Active RFID, the market for Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) is projected to grow even faster - from $145 million today to $2.7 billion in 2018. Several analysts have come up with broadly similar figures to these projected by IDTechEx and they could of course, all be wrong. However, the trend in number of suppliers of active RFID and trials, the trend in the size of the largest orders and other leading indicators show that the business is already on the move in a big way. Reflecting the fact that such a huge new market will serve many very different user needs, the choice of technologies is also becoming richer and more varied by the day. We now have RTLS that is “plug and play” and even RTLS that is battery operated, no plugging in being needed - just “play”. Indeed some new systems auto-calibrate - no need to map where everything is and no need to worry if readers are moved. Some RTLS locates to a few centimeters accuracy over fairly short range while other RTLS works at 300 meters away. There are now four main frequency bands to choose from in the array of RTLS offerings and for good reason, because the needs are so disparate. Indeed, no one knows how to land the biggest prize of all which will be major supply chains where we know the location of everything all the time. Here are some examples of the emerging structure of the RTLS market.