RFID Journal

For more than a decade, IoT has played an important role in capturing physical world data. Sensors, tags, and connected devices have made it possible to observe physical environments, assets, and conditions with increasing granularity. In many deployments, that data has delivered meaningful value within specific functions – improving visibility, informing decisions, and enabling more responsive operations.

For years, the conversation around fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and 5G was dominated by “the digital divide”— a race to get glass in the ground. But this is 2026 and the narrative has shifted. With the explosion of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), the densification of 5G, and massive publicly funded broadband projects hitting their stride, the challenge isn’t just a matter of intent. It is a matter of execution capacity.

Every four years, billions of people try to do the same thing at the same moment: watch a goal, buy a jersey, check a score, share a highlight. The 2022 World Cup final drew 1.4 billion viewers globally, with an average of 175 million people watching each match. These are not isolated requests distributed over time. They are synchronized surges and they expose a core weakness in the digital infrastructure behind them.

RFID technology and AI are helping industrial operations run smarter and faster. This combination turns physical assets into real-time data and allows teams to use that information to guide decisions for improved efficiency and automation. Radio frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to identify and track items fitted with small electronic tags. While scanning can look similar to barcodes, RFID does not need a line of sight to work.

Streamlined HTS classification and tariff calculations by replacing manual spreadsheets with Quickcode’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered centralized system. Accelerated quoting and sourcing while reducing compliance risk with more accurate duty and tariff decisions in a volatile trade environment.

The traditional castle and moat cybersecurity approach is no longer as effective as it once was. As physical and digital environments converge, more comprehensive and holistic security strategies are a nonnegotiable. As technological infrastructure continues to evolve and deepen in complexity, so do the opportunities for cyberattacks. Today, hackers are increasingly targeting hardware and restricted access points to bypass digital firewalls.

Enterprise RFID conversations have moved well beyond feasibility. Today’s leaders are focused on scale, interoperability, and return on infrastructure investments. Readers, tags, edge devices, and middleware platforms are more capable than ever.

Every UHF RFID tag in the world carries a tiny piece of state that most people never think about. It has no battery, no processor worth mentioning, and barely enough silicon to hold an EPC number. But tucked inside its memory is a set of four single-bit flags called session flags, and understanding how they work is the difference between a system that reads 500 tags cleanly and one that chokes on 50.

In today’s rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, presence detection and ranging technologies are becoming the backbone of intelligent spaces from hospitals and construction sites to industrial floors and smart vehicles. Yet most of today’s connected devices are still limited by legacy short-range wireless technologies that weren’t designed for low-power, high-responsiveness sensing.

The RFID industry has spent decades perfecting what goes inside the card— the chip, the antenna, the encoding, the encryption. We have moved from MIFARE Classic to DESFire EV3, closed known vulnerabilities, and built credentials that are genuinely difficult to compromise. But we have largely ignored what the card is made of. The default substrate for RFID hotel credentials has been polyvinyl chloride (PVC) since the 1990s. It is cheap, easy to print on, and structurally predictable.