When you're in the market for a new car, it's easy enough to compare models, performance reviews, and prices. But for shippers who are looking to make the best possible investment in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, the lack of benchmarks and past sales history can create challenges. That's where RFID testing laboratories come in, says Kevin Ashton, vice president of marketing at ThingMagic, a Cambridge, Mass.-based manufacturer of RFID readers.

RFID testing labs are popping up all over the country. Some are run by universities, others by equipment and software vendors, and still others by systems integrators. These labs are helping shippers adopt and take advantage of RFID, which promises to return higher data capacity and better read/write capability than bar codes, and with no line-of-sight requirements. They offer such services as RFID tag testing (testing different vendors' tags and labels on the shipper's products); business and/or warehouse environment simulations (to test the system's ability to operate on conveyors, loading docks, and forklifts); and testing of radio wave interference with-in a variety of environments.

Driving the development of RFID labs is the need for companies to test RFID solutions using various tags and readers before they purchase equipment and software, says David Sommer, vice president of electronic commerce for CompTIA, a computer industry trade group in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

Demand for testing services is expected to grow in tandem with demand for the technology itself. "It's an expanding market due to the increased use of RFID and [its] forecasted exponential growth over the next five to ten years," says Todd Myers, assistant professor and RFID researcher at the Russ College of Engineering and Technology's Center for Automatic Identification at Ohio University. The center has the ability to test RFID technology but does not run a stand-alone laboratory.

Also driving the trend are mandates from the likes of Wal-Mart and Target, says Keith Boyle, vice president of professional services for PEAK Technologies, a Columbia, Md.-based systems integrator that runs its own RFID testing lab. "Shippers who want to continue doing business with the mass merchandisers are going to have to get RFID-compliant," says Boyle. "Shippers can either wing it by going with what a particular vendor suggests, invest money in their own lab, or utilize an RFID lab to ensure that they have a working solution on their hands. It's their choice."

Calling RFID "a very young technology," Ashton is not surprised that so many labs are opening for business. "There are a lot of companies that want to adopt RFID technology, but they don't have the luxury of being able to create their own test labs," he says. "They need someone to do it for them, and we're seeing universities, vendors, and systems integrators filling that gap for them."

Services offered by these organizations range from a $1,500 certification of a specific application on a single product, to customized tests on a variety of products and environmental simulations at $150,000 or more. A company that sells many different products in different types of containers, for example, would pay a higher price for testing, while a smaller firm that just wants a lab to certify tag performance on several products might pay around $10,000 for that service.

In return, companies get an opinion on whether a specific RFID technology or product will perform well in a particular business setting—before investing a lot of money in the systems. "Shippers can gain a sense of what issues might pop up in the future and create the best configuration for whatever products their supply chains are handling," says Myers.

A beverage distributor shipping pallets of glass bottles, for example, might find that one RFID reader returns more accurate results than another. Or a shipper of a product in metal containers—notoriously troublesome in radio frequency environments—can compare the read ranges and data-capture percentages offered by various RFID technologies.

Testing various scenarios surrounding tag placement is another way labs can help, says Marlin H. Mickle, Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, which recently opened its RFID Center of Excellence. Using an EPC (electronic product code) Generation II reader and a table, for example, labs can position tags on specific areas of a box, carton, or pallet to determine which position yields the best results. "They can put it on the upper right-hand corner and then spin the box around at 360 degrees and on all axes. They can then place it somewhere else and do the same thing to find out which point on the box works best," Mickle explains. Continued...

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