Dec 06/Jan 07

Tracking assets within buildings is a sometimes neglected science, but growing numbers of systems are now available, and a development by Wavetrend could help accelerate take-up. The company has launched a new range of Ethernet and Wi-Fi readers, which it says offer a cost-effective and efficient platform for real-time location systems.

Both of the new readers enable standard local area networks to capture and distribute information constantly to users on the location of their tagged assets. Such assets can range from the smallest medical devices up to large construction equipment. Wavetrend says this kind of system can work in tandem with standard business operations without compromising the speed of the network on which they run.

It adds that both the Wi-Fi and Ethernet readers provide added value by working with standard Wavetrend active RFID tags, unlike the more costly, Wi-Fi tag-based alternatives. Wavetrend's tags transmit a signal every 1.5 seconds, and are said to have the longest battery life in the industry - up to five years.

If you'd like to see an example of this in action, you could try an implementation at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. Not exactly a logistics application, but it's a useful illustration of the convergence of RFID and Wi-Fi and its use.