The RFID industry finally has an international compatibility standard for UHF hardware. The International Standards Organization (ISO) has accepted EPCglobal's UHF Generation 2 air interface protocol, making it the international standard for communication between UHF tags and readers. The new standard is an amendment to ISO 18000-6.

"The publication of the amendment gives the EPCglobal UHF Gen2 specification global approval and makes it available to an even wider range of applications," says Steve Halliday, chairman of the ISO subgroup responsible for the standard. "This was the first of hopefully many opportunities for EPCglobal and ISO to cooperate."

Now that an international standard exists, makers may be more eager to build hardware based on the standard and end-users may be more comfortable investing in the technology, say industry experts.