Tesco says its nationwide rollout of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is on target to meet a revised deadline of mid-2006.

When the implementation started at the beginning of 2005, the supermarket said rolling out RFID tags and readers to 1,400 stores and 30 distribution centres would take a year. But the deadline was revised last July because of a number of challenges experienced during the project.

At the time Tesco said problems with radio frequency standards, a high concentration of tag readers in the warehouse affecting performance, slow read speeds and insufficient tag quality were preventing effective use of RFID for tracking goods on pallets. But the firm says that the revised completion date for the project will be met.

‘We are finalising rollout plans for the next stage, and are working with suppliers to find a solution that is robust enough to meet our demands,’ a spokeswoman told Computing.

Peter Harrop, chairman of RFID research specialist IDTechEx, says the UHF standard used by tags and readers is preventing users achieving efficient read-rates and performance in a warehouse environment.

‘The current European radio frequency regulations are very restrictive,’ he said.

‘A lot of rollouts have had problems with one reader interfering with another. The frequency standards need harmonisation across Europe to set a band of frequencies that enables readers to work well without interfering with each other, and to allow enough power to give the range needed to read these tags.’

Nigel Montgomery, RFID specialist for analyst AMR Research, says he would not be surprised
if RFID bandwidth limitations have also been a challenge for Tesco’s rollout.

‘The likelihood is that, where Tesco has gone beyond a controlled, test environment into spatially different, real-life environments, problems with tag strength and reader ranges become an issue,’ he said.