RTLS & WiFi Conversation Heats Up on LinkedIn Group…
July 22, 2010
If you are in the RTLS industry or a customer investigating the purchase of a a real time asset tracking solution, there is an active conversation going on in the LinkedIn Real Time Location System group. If your not a LinkedIn user, you will need to join to view the group, but worth paying attention to. Shoalib Oosman, from you the UK based firm Globalpark queried the group regarding the relevance of using WiFi vs. a parallel sensory network.
I have two customer discussions going on at the moment – both require real time asset tracking, one is looking at a WiFi solution (plus software and appropriate tags) and the other is looking at a tag-centric solution with it’s own radio network running alongside their WiFi (concerned about traffic). Aside from the cost differences – what does the group think about the perceived “competition” between these two approaches. No plugs for your own company’s solutions please ! – objectivity appreciated.
The thread is very lively, with folks from different camps (and manufacturers) defending their point of view. As respectful as the tone is here, there is a bit high tech mud slinging going on here that is telling regarding the state of the industry. All too often when talking to customers, the conversation starts with infrastructure. And the predominant marketing messaging out there is that the infrastructure is the solution. This can be pretty dangerous thinking.
In fairness to Shoalib, his query was specific to RTLS from an infrastructure perspective, so it’s fair that the thread is about infrastructure. As we work with customers we often find that technology buyers all too often want to boil it down to A or B. I would suggest that by not focusing on broader applications and “solutions,” the industry has seriously confused and kept away customers through slugfests like this. Overall adoption rate is nowhere any of us expected it to be at this point. Why is that? As some of the folks in thread suggest, there has been lots of over promising going on, and the technology needed to improve. But in spite of the improvements, the reality is that infrastructure alone will not deliver the results that customers are looking for when purchasing an visibility solution. One of the responders, Trish Messiter, smartly tries to reel all this in by suggesting:
The real question here is what is best for requirements? The answer, unfortunately, is “it depends.”
I’m with Trish on this one. While everyone is piling on regarding whether WiFi is a good solution or not, we don’t really get to hear what Shoalib’s customer is trying to accomplish, nor do we have a good enough understanding of the environment. In many cases, WiFi will make sense, or the infrastructure may be a hybrid one, with a location engine listening to different types of sensors used for different purposes.
July 22nd, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Couldn’t agree more. Infrastructure is a key element in developing a successful RFID deployment that scales properly. Proper requirement gathering is needed in order to scope out the project in its entirety and the vendor or partner must be mindful of scope creep when designing the infrastructure for the end user. All to often have I seen RFID projects destroyed due to an infrastructure that was unable to support the end user requirements.
The whole concept of wifi vs alternative rfid technology is moot point at best, however one can see how easy it can be to mislead the end user when not enough accurate information is forthcoming. It behooves us as RFID consultants/manufacturers to fully educate our channel partners and thus the end users to avoid misrepresentation and thus disappointment. I personally believe that this is one reason for a slower than anticipated global acceptance of RFID in a number of verticals….