In an exclusive interview, John Cunningham, Motorola's director for RFID enterprise mobility business in the Asia-Pacific region, and Louis Kirk, business development manager for Thailand, explained how the takeover of RFID specialist Symbol by Motorola is more than just another market acquisition to fill a niche, but is about the next evolution of the Internet.

Cunningham noted that Symbol was one of the inventors of Wi-Fi and has over 7,000 patents on RFID, while Motorola has more than 21,000 in radio.

Regular access points need authentication with the logic in the access point. This means that when someone roams about and switches access points, they need to reauthenticate. A wireless switch takes the intelligence from the access point and puts it in a central controller. This means that the user can then roam across different dumb wireless access points with a seamless connection without having to log on again all the time.

Using the same logic, if a company can combine Wi-Fi, WiMax and RFID on the same intelligent switch logic, each with different dumb radios at the periphery, the possibilities are enormous for creating an intelligent, end to end network.

"We look at our competition, and nobody has the devices and infrastructure for Wi-Fi, WiMax and RFID, or the management platforms," Cunningham said.

With regards to frequency, Hong Kong uses 920 to 925MHz and Singapore was set to use 923 to 925MHz. This meant that the latter would have had fewer channels to hop on and it would have negatively affected them in high-density installations such as warehouses or airports. Singapore has since expanded the band to 920 to 925MHz following pressure from industry users by taking bandwidth back from limousine drivers.

Australia is 920 to 926 (which is pretty much the same) and Malaysia is 919 to 923MHz. Thailand has allocated 920 to 925 MHz.

Cunningham said: "Thailand has done very well and has worked closely with industry organizations such as the GS1 to take into account the business impact and has made a decision to synergize with Hong Kong and Singapore, which is absolutely great.

"If Asean has a unified standard, the collective volume will help vendors drive costs down," he added, before noting that the European Union has one pan-Europe standard, as has the United States.

Malaysia, on the other hand, will have an isolated standard, meaning fewer vendors and higher prices.

However, this only affects the frequencies that the readers can operate on. All standard tags can operate on any frequency from 850 to 950 MHz. The EPC Gen2 standard is ubiquitous and will work around the world.

For Motorola, different readers does not just mean different software, but it means more testing, more quality assurance. Just ensuring that a certain firmware-reader combination works with every tag in the industry is hard enough.

Future applications for UHF tags include herd management as opposed to today's herd management. Traditional LF tags only work in close proximity to the animal, meaning it is useful only for when the animal is passing through a gate or when at the vet, for instance. UHF tags will mean that entire herds can be tracked in real time over pastures.

Another future use is access control. "Imagine you can walk to a door and the sensor can detect you from a meter away. You can get people in and out of a building more expeditiously," he said.

Today, however, the focus is firmly on supply chain management, baggage handling and logistics.

One solution that Motorola has is to tag documents--stock certificates, deeds or accounting papers--with RFID tags. Many people speak of the paperless office, but managing existing paper documents is still relevant, especially in government.

Another solution rolled out in Thailand by TNT logistics allows it track every package with RFID seals from the border to the warehouse. Already they are looking to expand it to Laos and Vietnam. It gives visibility, to see if the packages have been tampered with or have gone off route.

Malaysia is using Motorola RFID to track trees from Borneo to prevent wood going missing or being replaced. Motorola is also behind the baggage handling systems at Hong Kong and Las Vegas airports, claimed as the only two airports in the world with RFID in production mode.

The opportunity that RFID creates is that so much more data today is being gathered by the RFID readers--on average 20 times the amount of raw data. The challenge is then using this data to identify bottlenecks in the production process or supply chain.

Motorola does not do systems implementation and there is a lot of work and value for the local partner to contribute to a project. He estimates that for every dollar spent on a reader from Motorola, five dollars are spent on services, consulting and software applications.

Kirk said that the problem is that too often, the organizations he talks to in Thailand do not have a process in place and they have a misconception that throwing RFID at a problem will solve it.

But he also noted that it is promising that many Thai companies are looking at skipping over bar codes entirely and going straight to RFID.