Is UHF RFID better for conferences than NFC?

[EdwinParticipant]

Hi, you mention on your site that you work with UHF RFID. To what extent? As I understand it, UHF RFID can achieve read ranges of approximately 20ft. Is this true? 20ft is a long range, will it work if there is a crowd of people in cross proximity to each other? Cost-wise, what is it like? Are the readers going to be big and unwieldy?

I work at a creative agency and we’ve built some solutions for conferences using NFC. UHF RFID seems to be a good direction to expand our offering.

thanks,

Edwin

[RichardKeymaster]

Hey Edwin, we’ve been working with UHF RFID for a couple years now. We’re a Preferred Partner for Impinj so we tend to focus our solutions around their products. However, we’ve built systems using products from ThingMagic, GAO RFID, and RF-IDENT. The UHF RFID technology is designed to detect several tags at a time, even when overlapped and at different proximities to the reader. Think of a pallet of products rolling into a warehouse, today’s supply chains individually tag each item, thereby automating receipt confirmation that was traditionally done by hand. Unlike it’s NFC cousin, UHF hardware is much more powerful and hence expensive. A handheld reader costs around $500+ while a portal reader for mounting on a door frame is about $2500. We’ve done a large conference with several thousand people and over a dozen checkpoints and the cost ran just over $70k for everything. UHF tags are cheaper than NFC tags at less than $0.10 in high volume (2500+). The UHF portal readers are standalone and cloud connected, so your web app gets all the data for traffic flow, dwell time, personalization, and any other contextual stuff you can dream up. Each reader is self-contained and weighs around 6lbs so we often use standard photography gear to put them up and take them down quickly. All you need to provide is power and ethernet.

We’re experimenting with a rental program to bring the costs down to $500 per reader per event. We could do the installation or train your staff to do it yourself. If you have double-wide doors you’ll need two readers per, but otherwise you can get away with one. You can use the handheld units for badge registration very much like folks associate guest profiles with NFC.

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