As an important technology in the Internet of Things, RFID technology has many advantages, but it has not been widely used in the industry. The reasons are mainly summarized as the following five points.

Cost
    

       The high price of RFID from tags to chips to readers and middleware, coupled with system deployment costs, system maintenance costs, and possible market acceptance risks, has seriously hampered the marketing of RFID.

      At present, the average price of domestic readers is more than 5,000 yuan, and the ultra-high frequency readers are more than 10,000 yuan.

Compared with the past two years, the price of RFID tags has been greatly reduced.
    According to the news of RFID World Network, the price of STMicro in the United States has dropped to 5 cents per piece, but it needs 100,000 units for sale. 5 cents is only for the price of RFID chips, and does not include antennas and packaging costs. The current lowest price in China is 7 pt / piece.
    The biggest area of RFID application in the circulation industry is to replace the barcodes printed on general merchandise and use electronic labels. Imagine that the price of a pen you buy now is 2 yuan, the cost of the bar code is negligible; if the product uses an RFID tag, the price may be 3 yuan, the application of the RFID tag is mainly to facilitate the manufacturer and In the circulation link, as a consumer, are you willing to pay for this 1 yuan? Assuming that the price of all the goods you buy in the supermarket has increased by 1 yuan, how much do you spend on RFID each month? So RFID is in circulation. The sales industry is mainly used in the traceability and anti-counterfeiting of high-end goods.



Some multinational retail giants are keen on RFID tags, forcing orders in some regions that all their suppliers must use RFID tags (mainly RFID tags on logistics packaging and logistics equipment). An important factor in this approach is that it can save a lot of money. Labor costs. China's current human resource costs still have significant advantages, so most domestic enterprises are not demanding RFID.

In addition, the cost of the RFID system includes: the cost of implementation, startup and upgrade of the RFID project, the cost of supporting hardware and software, the cost of the RF system and the tag itself, and the cost of the system being destroyed.


      Technical restrictions

RFID technology is not yet fully mature, and it is embodied in three aspects.

First, it is applied to some special products, such as liquid or metal cans, and a large number of RFID tags may not work properly.

Second, the traditional electronic label manufacturing process is still relatively complicated. The label needs to be chemically immersed for labeling, and the label failure rate is high.

Third, the RFID tag and the reader are directional, and the signal is easily blocked by the object. Even if a double tag is attached, 3% of the tag cannot be read.



Standard
    RFID has not yet formed a unified industry standard. On the technical level, the technology of RFID readers and tags is not unified, and there is a possibility that they cannot be integrated. Within the industry, different types of label communication protocols, frequency bands, and packet formats developed by different manufacturers can cause confusion and confusion in use.

The RFID standard has five organizations worldwide, EPC global, AIM, ISO, UID and IP-X. The major international RFID standards organizations are striving for the Chinese market, while some domestic experts and government personnel are making localization modifications based on certain international standards or independently developing China's RFID standards.

If the EPC global standard of the American organization is adopted, the benefit is that the RFID system technology is mature, and there is a mature commercial operation mode, the cost of RFID hardware and software is low, and the system development cost is low. Of course, there are certain drawbacks. If we use the US EPC standard system in the distribution and sales industry, we must use the EPC server. The information management system between China and the United States has achieved docking, and the output of our products, the sales channels, the cost and other information. There is no privacy at all.

If localization is modified or the Chinese RFID standard is developed independently, on the one hand, it can be dominant in the direction of standard setting and data information confidentiality, but on the other hand, it takes a long time to develop new standards, based on new standards. The hardware and software cycle is long and the cost is extremely high. In addition, the docking and conversion between different standards have to be studied. Therefore, the road of RFID standards in China is still quite long.

At present, the China National Standardization Administration tends to use the EPC standard, and some of the domestic circulation areas are also using the EPC standard.

Frequency band

To use RFID technology to achieve information exchange in the global logistics field, there must be a global unified logistics RFID band. But for now, the frequency bands used in different countries are different.

In order to seize the middle layer of the space layer, China has rushed to launch GPS satellites in the case of GPS technology, which is correct from a national strategic point of view. According to the method of cosmic cultivation, whoever first occupied the land, the land belongs to whom. Similarly, countries are also preempting different frequency bands of the RFID standard.

Currently, in the UHF band, the United States uses 915 MHz, Europe uses 805.8 MHz, and Japan uses 960 MHz. However, in China, some frequency bands have been used as special frequency bands for other fields. Although the ISO Information Technology Committee uses the spectrum between 860 and 960 as the global UHF spectrum, it has not yet been determined in China.

If the world wants to use a uniform range of frequency bands, there must be sacrifices made by the state. If the country gets the benefits, who is willing to sacrifice? Who wants to sit and enjoy the benefits? Difficult!

Safety
    RFID technology uses electromagnetic waves to communicate and can store large amounts of data. It has relevant value for hackers, including eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, fraudulent replay and cloning, logistics cracking, RFID viruses and other security risks.

    In addition, once the RFID tag is close to the reader, it will automatically send out information unconditionally, and it is impossible to determine whether the reader is legal. Passive RFID systems do not have read and write capabilities and cannot use key authentication methods for authentication. This involves the protection of personal privacy and business security.
     At present, the security technology of RFID systems is still immature, and some preventive measures are also extremely extreme. Therefore, improving RFID security performance is also one of the important issues to be solved in the industry.

Although faced with difficulties, it does not need to be sad and desperate. At present, two important factors hindering the development of RFID: price and technology have made great breakthroughs. More and more manufacturers are involved in RFID, and RFID has matured through long-term and rapid technology accumulation.

The improvement of system integration stability and the improvement of electronic label technology have promoted revolutionary changes in RFID, and the breakthrough in price competition and technical difficulties has drastically reduced the price of RFID-related equipment.