A semi-underground container sits mostly below ground level, with only its upper section and the deposit opening above the pavement, and is emptied by a crane-equipped vehicle. In Senec these containers stand in groups inside a fenced enclosure, known locally as a stojisko, and it is the enclosure rather than the bin itself that the chip opens.

One chip, two doors

The credential is not new. It is the same chip the municipality already issues for access to the zberný dvor, the collection yard where residents take bulky and separated waste. Senec’s waste department enabled the container function for existing holders automatically, so anyone who had one already did not have to visit the office.

Residents without a chip collect one on the spot at the waste department office on the collection yard site on Železničná street, and must be registered for the municipal waste fee to get one. The office opens Monday 07:00 – 14:00 with the yard closed, Wednesday 07:00 – 15:30, Friday 07:00 – 13:00 and Saturday 07:00 – 15:00, and is shut Tuesday and Thursday, with Saturday issues only for chips requested by email during the week. Enquiries go to odpady@senec.sk, 02/2020 5152 and 02/2020 5168. The announcement names no individual official.

Additional chips cost EUR 5.50 each, and the cap on them is the detail worth reading twice: a household may hold no more chips than the number of people it pays the municipal waste fee for. Pay for four people, hold four chips.

The chip is the lock, not the label

Most municipal RFID in waste collection identifies the bin: a tag on the container carries its identity, a reader on the collection vehicle logs each lift, and the record feeds billing. Senec has had that for years. What it has added is a second system pointing the other way, a credential held by the resident and read at the enclosure, deciding whether the gate opens at all.

Tying the number of credentials to the fee register makes that chip closer to an entitlement token than an asset tag: the right to put waste in the container is issued against a payment record and can be withdrawn by the same route. It is pay as you throw enforced at the lid rather than on the invoice. Plenty of schemes identify a container, some weigh it, very few gate physical access to a communal one against who has paid.

Senec publishes no technical detail on either system. No frequency or tag specification appears in the city’s announcements, the procurement notice or the supplier material, so the band in use is not a matter of public record.

The container side: a tender that specified RFID

The bin identification half predates the locks. A tender for mixed municipal waste collection in Senec worth about one million euros, reported on 30 May 2024, required the winning collector to obtain collection data by means of RFID chips, and every mixed municipal waste container in the town already carries one. AVE SK odpadové hospodárstvo was the incumbent collector at that point, and no winner appeared in the publicly visible part of the notice.

Senec reads the resulting disposal data through ESONA, a container tracking system from Slovak supplier MIM. ESONA is described as tagging every container with a unique ID linked to the fee payer and carrying its volume and waste type, with readers on the collection trucks and every emptying logged centrally with date, time, fill level and GPS position for the municipality to view in a web application. The city’s waste officer said that data also forms the basis of the collector’s invoicing. Senec has used it to amend its waste and local fee regulations, and pays annual incentives to households that switch to a smaller container.

Why Senec started locking enclosures

The October 2026 announcement gives no reason for the scheme, but the motives were set out when the first enclosures were locked. A November 2024 report by Slovak broadcaster TV JOJ, quoting deputy mayor Juraj Gubani and waste officer Ivica Gajdosova, gave two: stopping residents of surrounding villages dumping waste in Senec, and ending night-time scavenging by people reselling what they took, which left waste strewn around the enclosures. Senec has more than 190 semi-underground containers, and the first stage covered 38 enclosures, which the broadcaster reported as leaving nearly half the town needing a chip to throw anything away.

The rollout has moved street by street since. At the end of September 2025 the city locked enclosures on J. Jesenského, Bernolákova, Košická, Pribinova and Bratislavská streets on identical terms, including no chip at all for residents who are not registered for the fee. Households are told building by building, with a notice on the door. The Salámka group is the next stage of that programme, not a new scheme.

More municipal schemes are collected in our waste management and access control coverage, and the terms used above are defined in the RFID glossary.

Read more at https://www.senec.sk/aktuality/2026/od-piatka-9-oktobra-2026-sa-uzamykaju-polopodzemne-kontajnery-na-salamke

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The protest was organised by The Westerlies Resident Welfare Association (RWA), and its complaints are directed at Experion Developers Pvt Ltd, the developer behind the township, and Mainage Facility Management Pvt Ltd, the agency engaged to maintain it. Officials of both could not be reached for comment despite several attempts, and none of the residents’ allegations has been tested by any authority.

What residents say is broken

On security the RWA is unusually specific. The boom barriers and the Park+ RFID tags at the entry gates are, in its words, “not working effectively”. Park+ is an Indian smart parking and society access operator supplying windscreen tags, gate readers and boom barriers to residential and commercial sites. It publishes no frequency band for its society tags and the source report names none, so they are described here only as RFID windscreen tags read at the barrier; the RFID glossary covers why the band matters.

Residents also say the MyGate visitor management system is absent at Kite Gate, one of the township’s entrances, which they argue leaves visitor verification unchecked there. MyGate is the dominant visitor management app in Indian gated housing, claiming on its own figures more than four million households across 25,000-plus societies.

The detail that matters technically comes last. The RWA says the perimeter fencing and boundary walls are damaged at several points, so the gate controls are bypassed anyway. A reader at a barrier governs only the route it covers, and a breach in the fence line turns a credentialled entrance into a formality.

Ninety per cent more for a system alleged to fail

Common area maintenance charges, known in India as CAM and levied by a developer or its agency for the upkeep of shared infrastructure, rose at The Westerlies from Rs 10 to Rs 19 per square yard per month over two years, an increase of about 90 per cent. Rs 19 is under 20 pence per square yard a month at late 2026 exchange rates, trivial until multiplied across a plot and then across 900 of them. The RWA wants the basis for the rise disclosed, audited accounts and vendor details provided, and a rollback to the last undisputed rate pending adjudication by HRERA, the Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority, which hears homebuyer disputes with developers.

Underneath the local row sits a structural problem that is not confined to Gurugram. Tags and barriers are sold into a gated development as a security upgrade, then billed to residents through a service charge. The residents paying have no contract with the vendor at all. The facility management company does. So when a reader stops lifting a barrier there is no service level to point at, no published uptime figure, and no route to a fix short of a protest or a regulator. Anyone specifying RFID access control into a service charge billed environment should be able to say who owns uptime, how it is measured and who sees the number. Mostly nobody can.

The framing is itself notable. Residents in disputes of this kind usually say security is poor and leave it there; naming Park+ and MyGate by product shows how visible the failure is day to day.

A 15-day deadline

The RWA’s wider list runs to an inadequate trunk sewage line, parks, a community club it says was never put into operation, power backup, roads and drainage, and the handover of common areas.

Rajesh Joon, the RWA president, asked: “Why are the amenities incomplete when the builder is charging more than necessary?” He alleged irregularities and called for a special investigation team, or SIT, a dedicated official team constituted in India for a single case. Vice president Ravinder Kumar Yadav said the builder’s promises remain unfulfilled and warned of legal action. Savita, a resident, said residents feel cheated and that the place of worship had been sold off.

The RWA has asked Experion and Mainage for a written, time-bound action plan within 15 days of the 4 October 2026 protest. Failing that, residents say they will approach HRERA, the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA), which runs infrastructure across the city, the district administration and other authorities.

The Westerlies is not an isolated case. Residents of Godrej Oasis in Sector 88A of Gurugram have run a comparable protest over a CAM rise from about Rs 4.79 to Rs 6.58 per square foot excluding 18 per cent GST. Two disputes are not a trend, but both point at the same gap: charges the payers cannot audit, covering systems whose performance nobody is obliged to report.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Members aged 15 and over who complete a face-to-face induction can upgrade their card free of charge and use a participating library from 8am to 8pm, with core staffed sessions still running through the week. Under-15s may visit during Libraries Unlocked hours but must be accompanied by a registered member, a safeguarding condition the council states plainly. Each site has full CCTV coverage, emergency phones and monitoring by County Hall Security.

Two reads, two jobs

The supplier is Lyngsoe Systems, the Danish automation firm best known in this sector for library materials handling and sortation, and to readers of this site for the real-time location work at Aalborg University Hospital. Its published Worcestershire case study lists three elements. Lyngsoe Self-Operated Library, or SOL, handles access outside staffed hours. Lyngsoe Phoenix tabletop kiosks handle borrowing, returning and renewing at every site in the network. PaperCut, the print management platform used widely across schools, universities and councils to meter and charge for printing, is integrated into the kiosks so that users can top up a balance and print without asking anyone for help. Lyngsoe says the PaperCut integration was co-developed with the council.

Our reading of what that means in radio terms, and it is our reading rather than anything the council or Lyngsoe claims, is this. The issue, return and renewal side is item-level HF RFID at 13.56 MHz. UK public libraries standardised on HF item tagging under ISO 28560, the international standard that defines the data elements and encoding rules written to a library item tag, and have done so for years. A Phoenix tabletop unit is a pad reader: you put the book down, it reads the tag in the spine or the inside cover, and the loan is recorded.

The door is a different read entirely. That is a credential read of the library card, not an item read, and it authorises a person rather than a transaction. Two technologies, two purposes, both described in the coverage only as “new technology” or “self-service technology”. If you want the distinction in one line, the kiosk asks what, the door asks who. Our access control coverage is full of deployments that get one of those two right and the other wrong.

The choice of HF for circulation is not an accident of history. At 13.56 MHz the read range is short and deliberate, so a single item presented to a pad reads reliably without the reader also picking up the shelf behind it. That selectivity is the usual reason libraries never moved circulation to UHF, where the longer range that makes RAIN RFID so useful in a warehouse becomes a liability at a counter stacked with other people’s returns.

The pilot numbers, and the network numbers

Phase 1 went live in June 2022 at Stourport and Droitwich. On the council’s own first-year reporting, opening hours at those two sites rose 85%, while core staffing hours fell 26% at Droitwich and 37% at Stourport. A council presentation cites a 56% increase in library visits twelve months after go-live. During the extended unstaffed hours in that first year the two sites together recorded 13,599 visits, 17,314 issues and 3,608 public computer sessions, which worked out at 8% of total visits and 11% of total issues for the two libraries. After one year, 68% of active members at Stourport and 52% at Droitwich had signed up for access, though later council documents give higher figures for the same measure, 79% and 65% in one presentation and 78% and 63% in a 2025 document.

Officers reporting to a council scrutiny board on 12 February 2024 were candid about one thing: overall user numbers had risen only marginally against pre-COVID levels. Longer hours did not by themselves conjure new readers.

Across the network, Lyngsoe’s case study records 130,263 Libraries Unlocked visits between June 2022 and November 2025, 17,480 customers registered as Libraries Unlocked members since June 2022, weekly opening hours up 59%, and more than 95% of transactions, including renewals and returns, completed at a kiosk or online. The council’s own page, using data to the end of May 2025, gives over 15,000 customers signed up, more than 100,200 visits, 113,000 book issues and over 26,500 public computer sessions during Libraries Unlocked hours. An October 2024 member survey drew 1,895 responses.

The rollout ran in three phases. Phase 1 in 2022 at Stourport and Droitwich. Phase 2 in 2023, which Lyngsoe describes as an expansion to seven more locations including Bromsgrove, Evesham, St Johns, Rubery, Kidderminster and Pershore. Phase 3 in 2025 at Redditch and Tenbury Wells. The council’s apply page names 11 live sites: Bromsgrove, Droitwich, Evesham, Kidderminster, Malvern, Pershore, Redditch, Rubery, St John’s, Stourport and Tenbury Wells.

Where it is not going

Three libraries will not get the model. Alvechurch is ruled out by private finance initiative costs, Bewdley by a lack of landlord approval, and Hagley by a low return on investment. Wythall remains under consideration, with discussions under way with Woodrush High School. That is a useful reminder that an open-access rollout is a property and contract problem as much as a technology one: a reader on a door needs a landlord who will let you fit it.

The published figures do not all agree

Anyone trying to reconcile the sources will hit four mismatches. The council papers reported on 4 October 2026 give 11 of 23 libraries, while Lyngsoe’s case study describes a network of 21. The council’s page lists Redditch and Tenbury Wells as live, then separately describes Bewdley, Redditch and Tenbury as part of “the next planned stage of Libraries Unlocked for 2025” with pre-implementation work in progress, which sits awkwardly beside the report that Bewdley is blocked by landlord approval. Something has changed there and neither document says what. On hours, the membership section of the council page says 8:00am to 8:00pm Monday to Saturday, while the section covering the seven locations that went live in 2024 says Monday to Friday. And Lyngsoe’s own case study heads its second phase 2023 but says in the body that the programme expanded in 2024. Malvern is named as a rollout site without being assigned to a phase at all.

None of that undermines the savings figure. It does mean a reader comparing this scheme against their own authority’s business case should go to the council papers rather than the summaries.

What the kit costs

The reported papers give the saving but not the capital cost, and that is the question worth asking. A useful benchmark exists next door. On 28 February 2022 Oxfordshire County Council awarded Bibliotheca Ltd, the other major supplier of UK library RFID systems, a contract with a total value of £541,740 to replace end-of-life self-service RFID kiosks across its 44 libraries. The term runs from 1 March 2022 to 28 February 2027, five years with an option to extend a further three, and the award notice describes a phased replacement with the first stage covering 10 libraries representing 69% of total in-county kiosk usage. It was procured through ESPO Framework 350_19 Library Solutions and Systems, Lot 1A. ESPO is a public sector purchasing organisation owned by a group of local authorities, and its frameworks are the standard route councils use to buy this class of equipment without running a full tender. Brighton and Hove City Council awarded Bibliotheca under the same lot for a different scope.

So the shape of the market is clear enough: two main vendors, one framework, and a replacement cycle measured in half a million pounds for a large county network. More named deployments with real numbers attached sit in our case studies.

A saving and a loss at the same time

Carol Brown, Worcestershire’s head of library services, told the panel the programme had “met its objective of increasing library opening hours” and that “We delivered just over £300,000 of staff savings through Libraries Unlocked”. She also offered the caveat that makes this a story rather than a press release, acknowledging that some customers would still prefer more staffed hours: “We know it’s not everyone.”

That tension is real. The hours RFID has added are hours with nobody at the desk. For a commuter who could never reach a library by 5pm, the trade is obviously worth it. For a reader who went to the library partly for the librarian, it is a loss dressed as a gain. Worcestershire’s answer, in part, is programming: writing groups, language groups, Adult Learning and U3A classes, school visits, cyber security courses, NHS baby and vaccination clinics, Age UK digital support, police drop-ins and Mencap support sessions all run during Libraries Unlocked hours, delivered by partners rather than library staff.

“The support has been responsive and collaborative, and the impact of Libraries Unlocked has been positive. It’s helped us reach more people, stay open longer, and offer something that genuinely fits the way our communities live. We wouldn’t have gone ahead with Phase 2 and 3 if we hadn’t been really impressed.” Kate Holford, Service Delivery Manager, Worcestershire Libraries

Worcestershire Libraries, part of Worcestershire County Council, runs 21 libraries including The Hive in Worcester, a fully integrated public and university library delivered jointly with the University of Worcester and described as the only one of its kind in Europe, plus a mobile library and two volunteer-run library links.

The next move is demand rather than hardware. Library managers are now targeting 13 to 17 year olds, with a new advertising campaign starting in Kidderminster aimed at people who do not currently use the service. Councillor Josh Robinson, cabinet member for communities, thanked library staff for the work. The HF kiosks and the door readers have bought the hours. Filling them is a different problem, and no reader will solve it.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The NFC Forum is the non-profit industry association that has developed the specifications behind Near Field Communication since it was established in 2004. NFC is the short-range branch of HF RFID, working at 13.56 MHz over a few centimetres, and the awards programme exists to pick out products that do something genuinely new with it rather than simply shipping a tag. Entry is free and open to members and non-members alike. A panel of judges cuts the submissions down to ten finalists, the wider NFC community then votes online for its top three, and the five most-backed solutions are declared winners.

3ALogics: a padlock powered by the phone that opens it

3ALogics won for VOLTEND, a battery-free NFC lockout/tagout system. Lockout/tagout is the industrial safety discipline of isolating a machine’s energy sources during maintenance, then physically locking the isolator so nobody can restart the equipment while an engineer is inside it. It has traditionally meant a mechanical padlock and a paper tag with a name written on it.

The VOLTEND lock has no battery and no mains supply. It behaves as a passive NFC device, harvesting energy from the RF field that the user’s smartphone generates when it taps the lock, and using that harvested power to authenticate the user and drive the locking action. Because every tap is an authenticated transaction rather than a turn of a key, the system also builds and keeps a verifiable digital record of who has access to the lock, which is the part a paper tag has never been able to do. 3ALogics is a South Korean fabless semiconductor designer founded in 2004 that specialises in NFC and RFID chips; VOLTEND uses an NFC sensor IC of the company’s own design, and 3ALogics holds patents covering battery-free NFC locking devices.

Miele: active and passive NFC behind one touchpoint

Miele, the German domestic appliance maker founded in 1899 and still family owned from its base in Gütersloh, was recognised for the KM 8000 and M Sense smart cooking system. According to the NFC Forum’s awards release, the system puts both active and passive NFC behind a single touchpoint, which is the technically interesting part of the entry.

The two modes do different jobs. In the active role the hob generates the RF field itself and reads the M Sense pots and pans placed on it, so it can identify the cookware and track and adjust the temperature automatically. In the passive role the hob instead presents itself as a tag to be read, and the smartphone supplies the field, which is what pairs the appliance to the Miele app. One NFC front end, two opposite roles. Miele’s own published material for the KM 8000 range describes full-surface induction that takes up to six pans with no fixed cooking zones, PowerFlex zones rated to a maximum 7.3 kW, M Sense cookware carrying integrated touch controls and up to three temperature sensors, automatic regulation across up to four pieces of cookware at once and a claimed energy saving of up to 30 per cent. Miele does not name the radio technology in that cookware material; the characterisation of it as NFC here is the NFC Forum’s.

NFC21: haptic tags that read themselves aloud

NFC21 GmbH won for SenseTap, an app built to help blind and partially sighted people live more independently. A sighted helper or carer writes, creates and manages tags through the app; the user taps the tag with their phone and the stored information is read out loud.

The detail that makes it work is that the tags are deliberately distinguishable by touch, so a user can find and tell them apart before scanning anything. The range covers permanent stickers that stay put on metal surfaces and survive a dishwasher, removable stickers with a squared shape that marks them out by feel and suits items that change often such as medication or food with an expiry date, and laundry tags that sew on, iron on or clip to a belt loop. Typical uses include telling medicines and their dosage instructions apart, identifying garments, and labelling desks, storage containers and emergency exits in a workplace. NFC21 is based in Mülheim an der Ruhr in Germany, has worked on NFC since 2012, and runs an NFC tag shop with more than 300 products alongside its software and cloud services.

QR Cattle: herd records that live on the tag

QR Cattle won for QR Cattle ID, which lets a farmer tap an NFC-enabled smartphone against an animal’s credential to pull up its details and medical history. The encrypted data is stored natively in the credential rather than fetched from a server, so the record can be read with no internet connection and no central database behind it. That matters most on remote holdings and at the far end of a field, where livestock traceability systems that depend on a mobile signal tend to fall over, and it means the animal’s history physically travels with the animal.

Spark Minda: NFC for identity, BLE for presence

The fifth winner was Spark Minda, for an NFC and Bluetooth Low Energy 6.0 based smart start stop button for vehicle access. The two radios are doing complementary work. BLE 6.0 handles presence detection, establishing that an authorised user is near the vehicle, while NFC supplies close-range verification at the button itself. Because NFC only works across a few centimetres, a tap is an unambiguous, deliberate act that is hard to relay from a distance, which has been a persistent weakness of longer-range passive entry systems.

Spark Minda is an Indian automotive component group whose flagship business is Minda Corporation. It holds more than 45 patents in vehicle access, passed a million smart keyless systems produced for two-wheelers for Indian and export markets, and operates 29 manufacturing plants across India, Vietnam and Indonesia.

The five finalists that did not win

The other half of the shortlist was Blok by Just Commit Inc., Pragmatic NFC Protect PR1311 by Pragmatic Semiconductor, TM NFC+ Augmented Reality Restaurant Menus by TM Technologies Inc, TRIFORA Smart Kitting by TOA Corporation and Smart Bottle by XenTag Inc. The Pragmatic entry is a flexible NFC chip announced in June 2026 by the UK semiconductor manufacturer, combining item-level authentication with tamper detection on a substrate thin and pliable enough to sit on curved packaging.

What the Forum said, and what the winners get

“It’s fantastic to see such variety in how NFC continues to be used to solve real world challenges and create better user experiences,” said Mike McCamon, Executive Director of NFC Forum. “This continued innovation demonstrates the long arc of contactless in action; an inevitable and accelerating adoption of NFC technology across countless use cases in line with the growing user demand for device-first solutions.”

Raul Ramos Perez, the Forum’s Certification Program Manager, added that “Each of the finalists for this year’s NFC Forum Innovation Awards demonstrated the technical elegance of NFC and how it can be used to make a difference to everyday life. For over 20 years, NFC has served as a trusted data exchange protocol, and this year’s Awards provide a timely reminder of its fundamental role in both the present and the future of contactless innovation.”

Winners receive featured placement on the NFC Forum website and two free registrations to the Member Meeting networking reception and demonstration expo in Lisbon. The 2026 programme follows the same shape as the 2024 edition, which also attracted more than 60 entries and was settled by the Forum’s first open public vote, announced at the European Member Meeting in Nice, France, with ProQure, BP Digital, Erisco, Blu Oberon and IoTize taking the five awards. The 2022 winners were revealed at an online ceremony instead. Energy-harvesting locks have now won in consecutive editions: Erisco took a 2024 award for a battery-less smart padlock, and 3ALogics a 2026 award for VOLTEND.

More coverage of NFC deployments and specifications is collected in our NFC section, and previous industry award rounds are gathered in our awards coverage.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Honeywell Technologies (NASDAQ: HON) is the industrial and building automation group that acquired the LenelS2 access control brand in 2024 as part of its purchase of Carrier Global’s Global Access Solutions business. OnGuard is LenelS2’s enterprise physical access control system, an on-premises platform built for large multi-site estates that need to manage credentials, doors and alarms centrally rather than building by building. NIWC Atlantic, headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, is the Navy’s engineering and acquisition command for command, control, communications, cyber and IT capability.

What the platform replaces

Before the deployment, access control varied from one Marine Corps installation to the next. Honeywell says many facilities relied on standalone locks that had to be updated by hand, with limited visibility into who had opened which door and when. In practice, a credential change for a Marine moving between installations was a local manual job, and an audit trail existed only where somebody had gone and collected it.

The replacement is a single centrally managed platform that can set and revoke access permissions remotely, monitor door activity across installations, and hold one consistent security posture globally. Honeywell states the deployment also meets Department of Defense cybersecurity requirements, which for a system of this type is usually the harder half of the work: a barracks door lock is a low-value target, but a worldwide credential database that can open 70,000 of them is not.

The credential layer Honeywell does not describe

The press release never uses the words RFID or NFC. What it does say is that Marines use Common Access Cards as the primary credential, with mobile credentials being introduced for barracks rooms and common areas. The technical layer under that has to be read off the standards, because Honeywell has not spelled it out.

The Common Access Card is the Department of Defense’s standard identity credential, a smart card compatible with the FIPS 201 Personal Identity Verification specification. It is a dual-interface card: a contact chip that works when the card is inserted into a reader, and a contactless interface that conforms to ISO/IEC 14443, the four-part standard for proximity smart cards operating at 13.56 MHz with a nominal read range of up to about 10 centimetres. That puts CAC squarely in the HF band, and it is the same air interface family used by contactless bank cards and transit tickets.

For a barracks room door, the contactless side is almost certainly what is being read. Asking a Marine to insert and withdraw a card at a bedroom door several times a day is not a workable design, and contact readers at that scale carry a maintenance burden that contactless readers do not. On the contactless interface the card exposes the Card Holder Unique Identifier, which is exactly the data object a physical access control system needs to match a cardholder record. Honeywell has not confirmed which interface the barracks readers use, so treat this as an informed reading of the standards rather than a stated fact.

The mobile credential piece is unnamed

Honeywell says mobile credentials are being introduced alongside CAC for flexible access to barracks rooms and common areas, but it does not name the platform. The obvious candidate is LenelS2 BlueDiamond, Honeywell’s own mobile credential product and the natural fit alongside OnGuard, where administrators issue and revoke mobile credentials from the same system that manages the cards. BlueDiamond supports NFC credentials held in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet as well as Bluetooth Low Energy, and its multi-technology readers also handle HID iCLASS, MIFARE and DESFire cards, with credential data protected by 128-bit AES. Those readers output over Wiegand, OSDP, OSDP v2 and supervised F/2F, which matters in a retrofit because it lets them drop onto existing panel wiring. None of that is stated in the Marine Corps announcement, and Honeywell has not said BlueDiamond is the platform in use.

Why the cost figures point at wireless locks

Honeywell says the modernisation reduced labour costs by approximately 80% and material costs by approximately 60% compared with legacy approaches. Those two numbers are the most revealing thing in the release, because of the gap between them.

An 80% cut in labour is not what you get from swapping readers on doors that are already wired. It is what you get from not pulling cable. Fitting more than 70,000 locks into existing barracks buildings, at a unit cost low enough to produce a 60% material saving, points strongly at wireless or offline electronic locksets rather than hard-wired doors with separate readers, controllers and power runs. Allegion publishes LenelS2 OnGuard interoperability for its Schlage wireless range, including the NDEB cylindrical and LEB mortise locks, which connect over the site’s existing Wi-Fi so no separate gateway hardware is needed, can run offline in no-tour mode or check in periodically to report events back into OnGuard, and quote up to two years of battery life. That is the shape of product the economics describe, but Honeywell has named neither a lock vendor nor a lock type, so the hardware family remains inference.

Barracks 2030, and the context the release leaves out

The deployment supports Barracks 2030, the Marine Corps modernisation initiative led by Commandant General Eric Smith to overhaul on-base accommodation for more than 80,000 Marines through furniture replacement, renovation and major upgrades such as air conditioning. The total cost has been put at roughly $11 billion.

Barracks 2030 has had a difficult press, and none of that appears in the announcement. Writing in the Marine Corps Gazette, the Corps counted 658 barracks buildings globally, of which 112, around 17%, were in poor or failing condition. Military.com reported in April 2025 that approximately 17,000 Marines were still in substandard housing as of March 2023, and that while the programme targets completion in 2037 if fully funded, inadequate Congressional appropriations could push it into the 2043 to 2045 range. A wall-to-wall inspection of more than 60,000 barracks rooms identified water intrusion, ventilation problems and security concerns among the recurring faults.

Access control is a small and comparatively cheap slice of an $11 billion programme, and it does not fix a leaking roof. It does address the security findings from that inspection directly, and a centrally managed lock estate is one of the few Barracks 2030 workstreams that can be delivered globally without waiting on construction funding.

Rollout and recognition

The programme started as a pilot at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, before expanding to further locations. It received FORUM’s Disruptive Tech Award in March 2026 and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s 2026 Distinguished Award for Excellence in Emerging Technology.

“The future of security lies in scalable, intelligent platforms that improve both operational performance and user experience,” said Ewa Pigna, president of Security and Access Solutions for Honeywell Technologies Building Automation.

That is the only quote Honeywell provided. The announcement gives no contract value, no award notice reference, no lock vendor, no reader model and no comment from NIWC Atlantic, and the trade coverage that followed it in September 2026 reprinted the release without adding reporting. For more deployments of this kind, see our Access Control coverage.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

FEIG ELECTRONIC is a German manufacturer of RFID reader hardware, with product lines covering rail, logistics, healthcare, libraries and access control, plus the cVEND family of unattended payment terminals used in public transport, EV charging, vending and parking.

What the ID LRU500i-BD is

The ID LRU500i-BD is a compact long-range UHF reader with an integrated antenna and a built-in signal light, which FEIG calls the traffic light function. It is built for automatic vehicle identification and access control, and FEIG names plant entrances, logistics sites, parking garages and safety-relevant access areas as typical sites.

Per FEIG’s product data for the ID LRU500i family, the reader works at 865 to 868 MHz under European ETSI rules and 902 to 928 MHz under FCC rules, with a read range of up to 10 m. Output power is a maximum of 2 W ERP on the integrated antenna and 1 W on an optional external antenna, adjustable in 100 mW steps. The integrated antenna is circular-polarised, so it reads a tag whatever its rotation, which matters when a windscreen or number plate tag arrives at whatever angle the driver happened to park at. The housing is IP67 and rated from -35 C to +55 C.

On the air interface the reader is a RAIN RFID device, supporting EPC Class 1 Gen 2, EPC Class 1 Gen 2 V2, ISO 18000-6C and ISO 18000-63. RAIN RFID is the industry name for passive UHF RFID built on that Gen 2 air interface: the tags carry no battery and are powered by the energy in the reader’s field, which is what makes long-range vehicle tags cheap enough to hand out in volume. Definitions for these and other terms are in the RFID News glossary.

What OSDP adds over Wiegand

OSDP stands for Open Supervised Device Protocol. It is maintained by the Security Industry Association and was approved as an international standard by the IEC in May 2020, published as IEC 60839-11-5. SIA released OSDP v2.2, based on that IEC standard, in December 2020, and v2.2.2 in October 2024.

Wiegand, the interface OSDP is gradually replacing, is a one-way signalling scheme from the 1980s. A reader pushes a credential number down the wire to the controller and that is the whole conversation: no encryption, no acknowledgement, and no way for the host to tell whether the reader at the far end is still connected. A cut line or a tapped line looks exactly like a quiet day.

OSDP is bidirectional and supervised. Commands and replies confirm that a message reached the device it was addressed to, and the host can tell when a reader has been removed or has gone silent. The OSDP Secure Channel profile supports AES-128 encryption. FEIG’s release does not state which OSDP version the ID LRU500i-BD implements or whether Secure Channel is supported on it, so integrators specifying the reader for an encrypted estate should confirm that with FEIG directly.

The wiring was already in the reader

The detail worth noting is a physical one. The BD variant’s listed interfaces were already RS485, USB On-The-Go and Wiegand, and OSDP runs over RS-485. What FEIG has added is therefore a protocol layer on a bus the reader already carried, not a new connector or a different cable type. RS-485 also supports multi-drop wiring and far longer cable runs than Wiegand manages, which is the practical reason OSDP tends to simplify gatehouse and barrier installations rather than complicate them.

FEIG says supporting both Wiegand and OSDP “offers a high degree of flexibility for new installations and modernization projects”, which is the honest reading: a site can fit the reader now against an existing Wiegand controller and move it to OSDP when the head end is replaced, without changing the hardware at the gate.

What the announcement does not cover

The 14 September 2026 release gave no pricing, no availability date, no named customer and no executive quote, and did not say whether ID LRU500i-BD units already in the field can be updated to the OSDP variant. Anyone planning a retrofit on installed readers should treat that as an open question.

Read more at https://www.feig.de/en/news-en/osdp-interface-for-id-lru500i-bd/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Fitting took place at two sites: the Maspalomas taxi cooperative in the south of the island on 11 and 12 September 2026, and an annex at the Gran Canaria Stadium in the capital on 11 and 14 September 2026. Technicians from SGMAS Software, the company assigned to the installation work, fix the tag to the rear windscreen in a few minutes. Drivers book an appointment through their cooperatives and pay nothing, because the Cabildo is covering the cost. The barrier system was scheduled to begin trials on 15 September 2026, running as a test phase before permanent deployment.

A tag that meters an entitlement, not one that opens a gate

Most vehicle RFID schemes at airports are access credentials: the tag says the vehicle belongs there, the barrier lifts, and the only question answered is a binary one about permission. Gran Canaria has built something different. Every taxi that reaches the barrier already holds permission, issued in advance through the Cabildo’s telematic platform, which coordinates with Aena, the Spanish state operator that runs Gran Canaria Airport. The tag is not there to grant the trip. It is there to prove the trip happened.

That is why the tags are restricted to visiting taxis. Licences from Telde and Ingenio already carry their own identification under the municipal system, so this is not a general vehicle identification scheme covering everything that comes through the rank. It is a quota meter fitted to the one group whose entitlement is capped, namely out-of-municipality licences and their 20 transfers a month. Metering an allowance is a harder problem than opening a barrier, and it is the reason the hardware exists.

The cancellation loophole in numbers

The figures published alongside the scheme show what the Cabildo is trying to fix. In 2025 it approved 58,501 transfers. Of those, 14,744 were cancelled by the requester, leaving 43,279 net and a cancellation rate of 25.2%. A group amounting to 1.48% of the island’s taxis was responsible for more than 30,000 of the authorisations requested. For scale, the theoretical annual ceiling if every taxi on the island claimed its full monthly allowance would be around 480,000 transfers, and the pre-pandemic baseline in 2019 was roughly 60,000.

The loophole sat in the cancellation step. A requester could cancel an authorisation simply by notifying the telematics platform, which handed the slot back to that licence’s monthly balance. Repeat that often enough and the 20-a-month limit stops binding, because the thing being counted is requests that survived rather than journeys that took place. Manuel López, the Cabildo’s director of transport, has framed the new system as making it difficult to cancel a transfer once permission has been obtained. A physical record of the vehicle at the airport is what makes a cancellation contestable.

ANPR at the barrier, RFID on the glass

The optical half of the system is number plate recognition. Vehicles pass a barrier fitted with a licence plate reader on the way in and again on the way out, and the platform checks whether that plate holds authorisation to pick up passengers at the airport. Reading at both ends matters. An entry read alone tells you a taxi turned up; entry plus exit produces a dwell record, which is far closer to evidence that a transfer was actually performed.

The RFID layer sits alongside it. The published material describes the plate readers at entry and exit explicitly and does not spell out where the windscreen tags are interrogated, but the logic is clear enough: two independent identification channels are harder to argue with than one, and a tag bound to a licence is not defeated by a dirty or obscured plate. ANPR and RFID are complementary rather than competing here, the usual arrangement wherever vehicle identification has to stand up to a dispute.

One detail is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to assume. None of the official material gives the air interface or frequency band of these tags. As general industry practice, windscreen-mounted vehicle identification tags of this type are commonly built on passive UHF technology, because a barrier lane needs read range measured in metres rather than centimetres, but that is a norm across the sector and not a confirmed detail of the Gran Canaria deployment.

EUR 60,000 and two platforms that had to talk to each other

The technical work rests on an agreement signed on 26 May 2026 between the Cabildo de Gran Canaria and the municipalities of Telde and Ingenio. The Cabildo has put EUR 60,000 into development and implementation. The substance of the deal is interoperability between two systems that previously ran separately: Transfer, the island-level platform managed by the Cabildo, and SG-Taxi, the municipal system used by Telde and Ingenio. Without that link there is no way to reconcile a tagged visiting taxi against the home fleet’s own identification.

Teodoro Sosa, the Cabildo’s councillor for presidency and sustainable mobility, said the agreement “marks a before and after” in institutional coordination for public transport on the island. Vanesa Martín, mayor of Ingenio, said “the best way to advance is through institutional collaboration”. Juan Antonio Peña Medina, mayor of Telde, said the initiative addresses long-standing demands from the taxi sector.

A first for the Canary Islands

López has described the arrangement as a novelty in taxi regulation across the archipelago, because Gran Canaria Airport is the only airport in the Canary Islands where taxis licensed outside the airport’s own municipalities may pick up passengers at all, and then only on an authorised transfer. No other island airport grants that entitlement, so none has the same enforcement problem and there was no existing model to copy.

The number to watch is the 25.2% cancellation rate recorded in 2025. If the tag and the plate reads do what the Cabildo expects, it should fall once the trial phase that began on 15 September 2026 gives way to permanent operation. It is a narrow, well-defined use of automatic identification: not deciding who gets in, but keeping an honest count of who already did.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The campaign was announced on 19 May 2026, with renewals opening online that afternoon, new subscriptions following on 21 May and the club shop handling general sales from 25 to 30 May. Regional coverage gives the scarf a name the club’s own announcement does not use, Solo Divio, and puts its unveiling on 12 June 2026. By early June 2026 the club had banked 1,700 subscriptions, more than it took across the whole of its previous season in National, the French third tier.

Binding a blank chip to a ticket

The ticketing runs on WeezTicket from Weezevent, the French ticketing and cashless payment technology company behind the deployment. A supporter buys a subscription online and receives an email containing a QR code. They take that to the club shop, where an operator scans the QR code on a Weezevent terminal, picks up a blank scarf with an NFC chip already built in, and taps the chip on the terminal’s reader. That single tap is the whole registration.

What that tap actually does is worth stating precisely. The tag in the scarf is a passive high frequency device working at 13.56 MHz, the same NFC band used by contactless bank cards and phone wallets, and it has no battery: it harvests its power from the field the reader emits. It carries a unique identifier fixed at manufacture. Pairing does not write a ticket onto the scarf. It records that UID in the ticketing database against the subscriber’s account, so the scarf is a pointer rather than a container, and the seat, the season, the entitlements and the cashless balance all live server side. Our RFID glossary covers the underlying terms.

That architecture is also why deactivating a lost scarf is straightforward. Nothing is wiped from the garment, which the club no longer has: the UID is flagged in the back end, so the next gate or till that reads it gets a refusal, and a replacement is bound to the same account in the shop in seconds. The old scarf reverts to being an ordinary scarf.

Reading on gates that were already installed

Fans present the scarf at the turnstiles at Stade Gaston-Gérard, which run Weezevent’s access control solution. The detail that makes this commercially interesting was reported by TheTicketingBusiness on 17 August 2026 and appears nowhere else: the gates are SKIDATA units. SKIDATA is an Austrian access control company whose pedestrian gates are a common sight in stadiums, ski lifts and car parks across Europe. If the scarves are reading on SKIDATA hardware, Dijon have not bought a bespoke entry system to make this work, they have added a new credential format to gates they already owned. That is a far easier business case for any other club watching.

The operational realities are ordinary NFC ones. Read range at 13.56 MHz is a few centimetres, so presentation has to be deliberate: the fan puts the right part of the scarf on the reader rather than waving the whole thing at it, and it is one tap per person. Stade Gaston-Gérard holds around 15,500 and recent matches have drawn 13,000 to 14,500, so the gate line is real and the difference between a confident tap and a fumbled one shows up in throughput. The club has kept the season ticket confirmation email valid as an entry method, which covers the fan who leaves the scarf at home in August.

A scarf is a harder home for an inlay than a card

The tag itself is cheap and well understood. Getting it to survive in a knitted scarf is not. A card protects its antenna inside a rigid laminate, whereas a scarf is folded, knotted, waved above the head, stuffed into a coat pocket, stretched and eventually washed. An NFC antenna is a tuned loop and its resonant frequency depends on its geometry, so permanent deformation detunes it and read performance degrades well before the chip itself fails. That is the argument for siting the inlay at the decorated end, where there is already a stiffer patch to carry it and where fans are least likely to knot the fabric. Accounts of the exact spot differ: Weezevent says the chip sits at the end of the scarf next to the leather DFCO badge, while TheTicketingBusiness places it beneath a small embroidered patch of the club’s owl emblem, which may well be two descriptions of the same decorated corner.

The scarf as a wallet

Entry is only half of it. The club’s announcement says the scarf can be used to pay directly at the concession stands, and Weezevent co-founder Pierre-Henri Deballon has described it as a wallet for buying drinks at the concession stands and beer walls. Weezevent has said it intends to extend the cashless function to purchases in the club shop. Adding stored value to the same credential is the usual stadium cashless pattern: the balance sits on the account, the tag identifies it, and the till is another reader on the same estate.

Analysts have raised the obvious questions, rather than problems actually seen at Dijon: how the data is protected, whether supporters less comfortable with technology are disadvantaged, the risk of concentrating entry on a single method, and the need for a clear policy on replacements and lost items. Connected merchandise works best as an extra credential alongside cards and mobile wallets, and the surviving email fallback suggests the club sees it that way too.

A first in France, not a world first

French coverage, including France 3 Bourgogne, Actu.fr and J’aime Dijon, calls this a first in France for a Ligue 2 club, and that is the claim worth repeating. It is not a world first. FC St. Gallen 1879 in Switzerland has run comparable connected merchandise through the phygital platform Zatap, where fans collect badges and points every time they tap an item. Between them the two projects suggest connected fan merchandise is becoming a category rather than a stunt, and one worth following alongside other sports and stadium deployments and the wider NFC coverage on this site.

Read more at https://www.dfco.fr/le-dfco-lance-sa-campagne-dabonnements-2026-2027-avec-une-echarpe-connectee-inedite/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

University Hospital Graz (Universitätsklinikum Graz) is one of Austria’s largest medical centres, serving tens of thousands of patients annually across dozens of clinical departments. Behind the scenes, an operation of this scale generates an enormous volume of workwear — scrubs, theatre gowns, lab coats, protective garments — that must be laundered, tracked, and returned to the right staff member at the right time. The facility processes approximately 11 tons of textile per day, and maintaining accurate circulation of that volume without RFID would be, frankly, unmanageable.

The Problem With High-Volume Hospital Laundry

Before RFID integration, large hospital laundries operated on trust and approximate stock counts. Staff would collect garments from dispensing points, send them to laundry, and hope the right items returned in reasonable time. Losses were routine. Overstocking in one department meant shortages in another. There was no way to enforce quotas, and certainly no visibility into where any individual garment was in its lifecycle — whether it was on a ward, in a laundry bag, being washed, or simply missing.

For a hospital the size of Graz, this translates to significant financial loss, compliance risk, and staff frustration when workwear simply is not available at the start of a shift.

The RFID Solution

The solution deployed at University Hospital Graz centres on UHF RFID tags sewn or heat-bonded into each garment. UHF — operating in the 860-960 MHz range under the RAIN RFID standard — is the right choice here for several reasons. It offers read ranges of several metres, allows bulk reading of many items simultaneously, and the tags are robust enough to survive industrial washing cycles repeatedly over the garment’s lifetime.

Each garment carries a unique identifier that ties it to a specific staff member, department, and garment type. The entire workflow is then orchestrated around RFID read points at key locations throughout the laundry and distribution chain.

Quota Enforcement and Access Control at Dispensing

One of the more distinctive aspects of this deployment is how strictly quotas are enforced at the point of dispensing. Staff collect clean workwear from automated dispensing cabinets — essentially RFID-enabled vending systems for clothing. When a staff member authenticates (typically via their hospital ID card), the system checks their entitlement: how many garments of each type they are allowed to hold at any one time.

If a staff member already has their full quota of trousers, for example, the cabinet will not issue another pair until dirty items have been returned and logged. This closes the loop that previously allowed garments to accumulate in lockers or disappear entirely. It is access control applied to textile management, and it works because every transaction is recorded against the RFID identity of both the garment and the staff member.

Full Transparency of the Textile Lifecycle

Beyond dispensing, RFID read points are positioned at soiled linen collection, laundry intake, sorting, washing completion, and finished goods storage. At each stage, garments are scanned — often in bulk as entire trolleys pass through tunnel readers — and the system updates each item’s status in real time.

This means management can see, at any point, how many garments are currently on the wards, how many are in the laundry process, how many are in clean stock ready for dispensing, and crucially, how many have exceeded their expected wash cycle count and are due for retirement. Garment lifespan management reduces unnecessary waste and helps procurement plan replacement orders accurately rather than reactively.

Operational Results

Deployments of this type consistently demonstrate measurable reductions in textile loss rates — often between 20 and 40 percent — alongside reductions in total garment inventory needed to maintain adequate stock levels. When you know exactly where every item is, you do not need to overstock as a buffer against uncertainty. At Graz’s scale, even a modest percentage reduction in inventory translates to significant cost savings.

Staff experience also improves. Automated dispensing means no waiting for a linen room attendant, no disputes over who took what, and no shift starting without the right uniform. The system handles all of that transparently in the background.

Why This Model Works for Healthcare

Healthcare is a demanding environment for any tracking technology. Garments face aggressive laundering, high humidity, and frequent handling. UHF RFID tags designed for laundry applications are rated for hundreds of wash cycles at temperatures up to 90 degrees Celsius, making them genuinely suited to the environment rather than merely tolerant of it.

The compliance angle also matters in healthcare specifically. Knowing that a garment has been through a certified wash process, and being able to prove it, is increasingly relevant from an infection control and audit perspective. RFID provides that audit trail automatically.

University Hospital Graz demonstrates that at scale, RFID laundry management is not just a convenience — it is an operational necessity. The combination of UHF tagging, automated dispensing with access control, quota enforcement, and full lifecycle visibility turns what was an opaque and loss-prone process into something measurable, controllable, and efficient.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

By launch day on 25 August 2026, 11,100 people had activated the credential. Fewer than 20% of that summer’s orientation attendees chose to take a physical card at all.

What a mobile BuckID opens and pays for

Ohio State is a public university in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the largest in the United States by enrolment, so a BuckID touches a lot of daily life. The mobile version covers residence hall and academic building access, dining locations, off-campus merchants that accept BuckID, recreation facilities, printing and copying, and timeclocks.

“A BuckID provides access to all kinds of important things at Ohio State,” said Josh Bodnar, director of BuckID. Every Columbus campus building that accepted a physical BuckID was due to accept the mobile credential before the autumn semester started.

The readers were already there

Mobile BuckID is read by the tap-enabled NFC readers already fitted across campus, the same contactless units that read the chip in the physical card. That is the part worth noting for anyone planning a similar project. Ohio State added a tap-to-pay chip to the physical BuckID in 2022, moving the campus from swipe to tap several years before the phone credential arrived, so the mobile rollout did not need a door hardware replacement programme behind it.

As general background, mobile campus credentials in the Apple, Google and Samsung wallets are provisioned as NFC applets inside the phone’s secure element, a tamper-resistant chip kept separate from the main processor, and they are read over the same 13.56 MHz contactless interface as a conventional contactless smart card. Ohio State has not named the credential platform vendor behind Mobile BuckID.

Two features do the practical work of making a phone credible as a door key. Apple’s Express Mode means the device does not need to be unlocked to tap, so a phone pulled from a pocket behaves like a card. Battery Reserve keeps the credential working for several hours after a compatible iPhone or Samsung Galaxy device has powered down on a low battery, which answers the obvious objection that a flat phone locks you out of your own room. Supported hardware includes compatible iPhone models, Apple Watch, eligible Android phones, and Samsung Galaxy devices including Samsung watches.

Activating it, and who cannot

Provisioning runs through the Ohio State app: users open the BuckID section and tap “Ready to Provision”. Two prerequisites have to be in place first, a photo on file, which is reviewed in three to five business days, and multi-factor authentication enabled. Only one credential is active per person, so activating the mobile version deactivates the physical card.

Not everyone at the university could switch. Some people at the Wexner Medical Center and some of the health science colleges were not eligible at launch. Students in fully online programmes and remote employees can use a basic digital BuckID in the Ohio State App instead. The rollout covers the Columbus campus only, with regional campuses planned for 2027.

A year early, and one thing dropping off

The university had originally targeted 2027 for a mobile credential and delivered it a year ahead of that after advocacy from student government. “Mobile is always kind of where we were headed… We have managed to beat that goal by a whole year,” Bodnar said.

One capability is moving in the other direction. Support for physical BuckID cards on COTA, the Central Ohio Transit Authority bus network that serves the Columbus area, ends at the close of 2026. From 2027, riders use either the Ohio State app or a transit card issued by COTA.

Campus and workplace credentials have been one of the steadier drivers of NFC deployment, and more coverage sits in our NFC and access control sections.

Read more at https://news.osu.edu/mobile-buckid-now-available-for-columbus-campus

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

This is not just a door key. USC describes the CarolinaCard as the permanent USC ID card plus a flexible spending declining balance card, carrying CarolinaCash and Meal Plan dollars, with balances and account history managed through an online portal. Meal plans are supplied by Carolina Food Co. and are mandatory for first year students living on campus. The mobile version therefore has to do identity, physical access and payment at the same time, which is what makes a campus card a harder problem than a plain access badge.

What the first phase covers

The initial phase takes in residence halls, classrooms, dining locations, parking facilities, recreation facilities, postal services and the library, with expansion planned later to off campus locations and to other campuses in the system. That opening list is the high traffic estate rather than the whole university, so coverage on day one is partial by design. Anywhere outside it carries on as before until the rollout reaches it.

Activation is self service. Users download Transact eAccounts, select University of South Carolina, sign in with their network credentials, upload an ID photo and a government issued photo ID, then choose Add to Wallet. The credential can be held on up to two devices. Access is by tap at card readers, with barcode scanning in the app for certain services. The CarolinaCard Office is handling support on 803-777-1708 and carolinacard@sc.edu.

“USC wanted to make everyday campus life easier,” said Chavis McDonald, Director of Customer Experience and Change Management for Business Affairs. “Students, faculty and staff already manage so much from their phones, so bringing the CarolinaCard to a mobile format felt like a natural next step.” McDonald also framed the move as forward looking: “Mobile credentials open the door for future innovation. They create a more flexible and secure foundation that can grow with the university.”

What actually changes under the reader

The following is general practice in campus credentialing rather than a description of USC’s specific configuration, which has not been published. A campus card estate of this type runs on 13.56 MHz HF contactless, and a mobile credential in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet reaches the reader over NFC, with the phone emulating a card. The credential itself sits in the phone’s secure element, not in the app. The app is the enrolment and account management front end, not the thing the reader talks to.

The architectural change that matters is not the form factor, it is provisioning. A mobile credential is issued and revoked over the air. A lost plastic card means a trip to the card office, a replacement fee and a window in which the old card is still physically capable of opening a door. A lost phone credential is killed centrally and reissued to a new device in minutes. That is the reason universities keep citing security when they explain these projects, and it is a fair reason.

Apple’s implementation also supports Express Mode, so the card presents at a door or a till without unlocking the phone, and on recent iPhones it keeps working for a period after the battery is too flat to run the phone. That detail is what makes a handset credible as a room key at all. A credential that fails when the battery dies is not a credential.

The two device limit is not an arbitrary policy either. Each provisioned credential is a separate cryptographic instance sitting in a separate secure element, and campus systems are typically licensed or billed per credential. Two is the usual compromise between a phone and a watch.

Tap or barcode tells you how far the hardware refresh got

The most informative line in the announcement is the mix of tap to access and barcode scanning. Where the reader estate has been upgraded you get an NFC tap. Where it has not, the app falls back to a barcode on the screen, read by whatever scanner is already at the counter. Every large campus mobile credential rollout is really a reader replacement programme with an app on top, and the barcode fallback is the honest signal of how far that refresh has actually reached. Expect the barcode footprint to shrink as more readers are swapped out.

Retiring the plastic is the interesting decision

USC is explicit that once the mobile credential is activated, the physical CarolinaCard is deactivated and can no longer be used. Plenty of universities run both in parallel. Going mobile only per user is cleaner, because two live credentials for one identity is a genuine administrative and audit headache, but it does put the handset on the critical path for getting into your own room.

That raises a practical question the announcement does not settle. Mobile credentials are not mandatory for students, according to earlier reporting in The Daily Gamecock and Carolina News and Reporter, which also noted that incoming spring 2026 students acted as a pilot group. Anyone who does not have a supported phone, or does not want to carry one, presumably stays on plastic. It would be useful to see USC spell out how that group is served, and what happens when a phone is lost, stolen or in for repair.

Worth stating plainly: USC has not published the reader hardware, the credential format or the secure element implementation behind the Mobile CarolinaCard, so nothing above should be read as a claim about the specific technology in use on campus.

Read more at https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/carolinacard/index.php

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The architecture is a familiar one in secure credentialling circles, and an unusually under-reported one in the RFID trade press. Each cardholder’s biometric reference is written to the card itself; at the point of use a camera captures a live facial image and the system performs a one-to-one comparison against the reference tied to that specific credential. That is verification, not identification: there is no search across a population-scale gallery, and according to the company no biometric record needs to travel to a back-end server for the decision to be made.

Match-on-card is the term of art here

The established name for this approach is match-on-card, also written as on-card biometric comparison, and it is standardised in ISO/IEC 24787. In a strict implementation the reference template never leaves the chip at all: the terminal extracts a template from the live capture, sends it to the card over the contactless interface, and the card’s own secure microcontroller runs the comparison and returns a match or no-match result. The credential becomes the biometric database, and it is a database of exactly one person.

MIA Teknoloji’s announcement is not explicit on where the comparison itself executes, describing only that a device compares the new capture against data associated with the card. That distinction matters more than it sounds. If the template is read off the card and compared in the reader, the privacy story rests on the reader discarding it; if the comparison runs inside the card’s secure element, the reference is never exposed to the terminal in the first place. Anyone evaluating the system commercially should establish which of the two it is.

This is HF contactless smart card territory, not UHF

Identity and access credentials of this type sit in the HF band at 13.56 MHz, almost always as ISO/IEC 14443 proximity cards read at a few centimetres, with ISO/IEC 7816 command handling on top and, in eID and ePassport work, the ICAO Doc 9303 security model (PACE, secure messaging, EAC) governing how the chip’s data groups are protected. It is not UHF RAIN RFID: the deliberately short read range is a security feature, the interface supports the APDU exchange that on-card cryptography and biometric comparison require, and the throughput of an ISO/IEC 14443 link at 106 kbit/s and above comfortably handles a facial template, which typically runs from a few hundred bytes to a few kilobytes rather than a full photograph.

Face is the harder modality to do this way. Fingerprint match-on-card has been shipping in volume for years, including Neurotechnology’s on-card matching algorithms and the fingerprint-authenticated NFC access credentials from Zwipe and LEGIC, because fingerprint templates and comparison routines fit the modest compute budget of a smart card chip. Doing the equivalent with facial templates on constrained silicon is a genuine engineering result, which is presumably where a sizeable chunk of that 98 million lira went.

The KVKK angle

MIA Teknoloji positions the design as aligned with Turkey’s Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK), and the logic is sound as far as it goes: keeping the reference on the card removes the centralised biometric honeypot and cuts the number of transfers of special-category data. It does not remove the obligations around it. Consent capture, access logging, retention limits and the handling of enrolment data all still have to be right operationally, and a lost or cloned card raises its own questions about how the on-chip reference is bound to the credential and to the issuer.

No customers, volumes or launch dates yet

What has been announced is the completion of an R&D programme, certified as such by the ministry, and nothing further. MIA Teknoloji has not named an initial customer, disclosed production quantities, or given a commercial launch date, and the company describes commercial deployment as the next stage rather than a current one. Until a pilot with a named issuer emerges, this is a validated design looking for a deployment, not a product in the field.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The mandate says digital, not NFC

The Premier League’s own wording is deliberately technology-neutral. A digital ticket is one delivered electronically, most commonly to a mobile phone, and assigned to a named supporter registered with the club. The league’s stated rationale is anti-touting and fraud prevention, and it points at “hidden or rotating barcodes” as the security mechanism. Nothing in that language requires a radio.

Clubs could have complied with a rotating QR code and been done with it. A significant number did not. They went to 13.56 MHz HF, wallet passes and tap entry, because the operational problem they actually needed to solve was not fraud. It was throughput.

The two-year grace period for promoted clubs is not a softening of the rule, it is an acknowledgement that stadium ingress is a capital project. A club coming up from the Championship is not just buying a ticketing platform. It is potentially retrofitting reader heads in every turnstile lane, rewiring, revalidating egress procedures, retraining stewards and running a season of parallel operation before it can safely switch anything off. Two years is roughly one procurement cycle plus one shakedown season. It is a realistic number, not a generous one.

Where the fifteen actually are

“Fifteen clubs with NFC deployed to some degree” hides a wide spread of maturity, and the differences are the story.

Arsenal has completed the transition. The club is on 100 per cent digital ticketing at the Emirates and its supporter-facing FAQ set now explains near field communication to fans as a matter of routine, alongside separate iPhone and Android guidance. It is worth being precise about one thing that has been misreported elsewhere: 31 August is simply Arsenal’s first home fixture of the campaign, not an enforcement deadline. There is no cutover pending there. Note also that Arsenal’s FAQs still address a rotating QR code on Android, and explicitly rule out screenshots, which points to a dynamic optical fallback running alongside the NFC path rather than a hard NFC-only estate.

Tottenham Hotspur has taken the most aggressive position in English football. Working with ticketing platform FortressGB, the club is removing QR codes from digital tickets and passes entirely for 2026/27 and asking every fan to tap. The club’s own reasoning is refreshingly unmarketed: QR scanning causes delays, often because of low screen brightness, and QR is easier to duplicate and reshare. Spurs are updating stadium signage and giving turnstile operators extra training for the changeover, which is the detail that tells you they expect a behavioural problem, not a technical one.

Liverpool has been running NFC passes at Anfield for a while and has the most mature pass lifecycle of the group. Season ticket holders and members hold a pass in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet that automatically updates itself with the next fixture they are due to attend, so there is nothing to re-download between games. Passes for the new campaign were issued from 22 June. Liverpool sets a device floor of iPhone 6 and above plus most Android handsets, and the same pass doubles as proof of membership for retail discounts in club stores, which is a neat piece of credential reuse.

Manchester City and Crystal Palace are the two confirmed VTAP reader deployments, City at the Etihad and Palace at Selhurst Park, with fans directed to tap on a dedicated reader at the lane.

The reader layer nobody is writing about

VTAP readers are made by Dot Origin, a UK company with more than twenty-five years in the smart card and NFC business, working in partnership with Apple and Google. Outside the Premier League the same hardware turns up across every La Liga stadium, at FC Porto and at Ascot Racecourse.

The product line matters because it maps neatly onto how venues actually retrofit. There are embedded NFC reader boards designed to go inside an existing turnstile head, which is the difference between a firmware and bracket job and ripping out the pedestal. There are standalone indoor and outdoor access control readers for gates and hospitality doors. There are USB and Bluetooth desktop, kiosk and point of sale units, which is how the same wallet pass ends up being read at a merchandise till or a hospitality check-in desk. And there are hybrid heads that accept NFC, contactless RFID cards, barcode and QR in a single unit.

That hybrid capability is doing a lot of quiet work. Clubs are not starting from nothing. Most have an installed base of physical contactless season cards, staff and contractor credentials, and accreditation media that still need to be read at the same lanes. A reader that handles a wallet pass and a legacy HF card without a second head on the pedestal is what makes a phased migration survivable.

What actually happens when a fan taps

This is the part missing from every consumer write-up. A wallet ticket is not a tag and it is not a stored barcode with a radio bolted on. It is a cryptographic credential presented by the handset in card emulation mode over the standard 13.56 MHz HF interface.

On iPhone that exchange runs over Apple’s Value Added Services protocol. The reader broadcasts an identifier for the pass issuer it is looking for, the phone selects the matching pass without the fan having to open anything, and returns a payload encrypted to a key pair the venue controls. On Android the equivalent is Google’s Smart Tap, which negotiates a session key with the reader and returns a signed pass payload the same way. In both cases the reader is not “scanning” anything the user can see. There is no visual representation of the credential to copy.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the value that comes off the tap is not a static number, so intercepting one transaction does not give you a reusable ticket. Second, because the pass and its keys live on the device, the handset does not need a data connection at the gate. Network dependence sits on the venue side, at the reader and the validation host, which is exactly where a stadium operator can engineer redundancy. That is a materially different failure profile from a fan standing in the rain trying to load a web ticket on congested cellular.

The anti-touting consequence is the one the league cares about. A barcode, even a rotating one, is a picture, and a picture can be photographed off a screen and sold. A wallet pass has no picture to sell. Arsenal’s FAQs make the point to fans directly, telling them a screenshot will not get them through the gate, and Tottenham cite duplication and resharing as a reason for dropping QR entirely. Transferring a ticket then has to go through the club’s own transfer flow, which is precisely where a club wants the audit trail to sit.

Why throughput is the real driver

Consider the arithmetic of a 60,000 seat bowl. The overwhelming majority of that crowd arrives inside a 40 minute window before kick off, through a fixed number of lanes. Every second of average dwell time per fan at the turnstile multiplies out across tens of thousands of transactions into queues on the concourse and outside the ground.

An optical scan is a chain of things that can go wrong. The screen has to be awake, bright enough for the imager, held at the right angle and distance, and not obscured by a case, a wet phone, a glove or low winter sun. Auto-brightness fights you. Any one of those failures turns into a retry, a steward intervention and a stalled lane.

A tap has almost none of that. It is a proximity event over a few centimetres, it works in darkness and rain, it does not care about screen brightness or orientation, and on iPhone with Express Mode enabled it does not require the fan to unlock the device or open an app at all. Tottenham’s public reasoning and Manchester City’s turnstile upgrade programme point at the same conclusion: the queue, not the fraudster, is what pushed these clubs to radio.

The friction that does not make the press release

None of this is free. Liverpool’s own guidance carries a blunt warning: do not delete the pass from your wallet once it is downloaded, because it may not be possible to re-download it. Pass reissue is the hardest part of any wallet credential programme, and telling supporters to be careful is a mitigation, not a fix. A lost or replaced handset on a matchday morning is a box office problem, and every club needs a manned fallback path for it.

There is a device floor, too. Liverpool’s iPhone 6 and above line is generous, but it is still a line, and older or budget Android handsets with unreliable NFC stacks will produce a tail of failed taps for a steward to resolve at the lane. Any fan without a smartphone is dependent on club discretion. The Premier League has kept that door open, allowing clubs to issue alternative formats to supporters with reasonable grounds, including disabilities that make digital tickets difficult to buy or use. How generously individual clubs interpret “reasonable grounds” is now a genuine accessibility question, and it will be tested in public during the first few matchdays.

And a tap-only estate concentrates risk. Removing the QR fallback, as Tottenham are doing, removes the thing that saves you when a reader head fails or a phone will not cooperate. It is a defensible decision, but it moves the burden onto reader reliability, spares holding and steward training.

What to watch next

The opening weekend of 21 to 23 August is the first real load test of the mandate at scale, and Arsenal’s first home fixture, expected around 31 August, will be watched as an example of a completed transition operating at full capacity rather than as a deadline. Beyond that, the obvious next question is open loop. The readers going into these turnstiles already speak the same 13.56 MHz language as a contactless bank card, and hybrid units already handle physical HF credentials. Whether clubs move from a wallet pass to accepting the card the fan bought the ticket with, as transit operators did, is the interesting part of this story that has not started yet.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

That is because digital ticketing is no longer a club-by-club preference. Premier League clubs voted in August 2024 to make it mandatory, with a two-year phased transition running to the 2026/27 season, and clubs promoted into the league get two years of their own to comply. The league describes a digital ticket as electronically delivered, assigned to a registered supporter, and protected by “enhanced security features such as hidden or rotating barcodes”. The mandate is about digital delivery and supporter assignment rather than any one technology, so NFC remains a club-level implementation choice. West Ham has been running NFC entry at London Stadium for several seasons, which puts it ahead of the curve rather than scrambling to meet it.

What actually happens at the turnstile

An NFC wallet ticket is HF RFID, operating at 13.56 MHz and built on ISO/IEC 14443 Type A along with the ISO/IEC 18092 peer and card-emulation modes. The reader in the turnstile generates a short-range field, typically effective over a few centimetres, and the handset responds in card emulation mode. On iPhone and Apple Watch the credential sits in the device secure element and is presented over Apple’s Value Added Services profile, which relies on Enhanced Contactless Polling so the correct pass is selected and presented automatically without the supporter opening an app. Android handsets do the equivalent through Google Wallet and Smart Tap, with host card emulation removing the need for a physical secure element in the phone.

Two practical consequences follow. First, what crosses the air interface is a cryptographic exchange between reader and wallet, not a picture of a barcode. Second, once the pass has been downloaded to the device, the tap itself does not need mobile data or Wi-Fi, which matters a great deal in a bowl holding 60,000 people. The device does need to be switched on, and West Ham’s guidance is explicit that a pass showing as expired will still admit a supporter provided the ticket has not been shared or resold.

Why a tap beats a screenshot

The touting problem is really a copying problem. A static barcode is just an image, so it can be screenshotted, forwarded and sold as often as the seller likes, with the loser being whoever arrives second. Rotating barcodes narrow that window by regenerating the code every few seconds, but they still depend on the display, on screen brightness and on the fan holding the phone at the right angle. An NFC pass cannot be screenshotted in any useful sense, because the credential is provisioned into wallet storage bound to that device and the token presented is generated at the moment of tap. Combine that with one-use tickets that cannot be passed back out after entry, as West Ham enforces, and the secondary market gets harder to work.

There is a fairness caveat that clubs and the league both acknowledge. West Ham continues to issue physical Season Tickets on request to supporters over 65 or with accessibility needs, and anyone without a compatible handset can go through the Ticket Office. The Premier League’s policy allows for similar exemptions, including group bookings and supporters for whom a digital ticket is genuinely difficult to use.

For the RFID industry, the wider point is the reader estate. A mandate that pushes twenty clubs off paper has quietly funded one of the larger HF NFC access control deployments in UK sport, and every turnstile now certified for Apple VAS and Google Smart Tap is also a platform for cashless spend, loyalty and stadium access on the same 13.56 MHz interface.

Read more at https://www.whufc.com/en/fans/hammers-hub/ticketing/digital-tickets-on-matchdays

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The announcement, made from Eindhoven on 4 August, is more interesting for what the silicon does than for the badge on the bonnet. NXP describes the Trimension NCJ29D6 as the first monolithic automotive UWB device to combine secure fine ranging with short-range radar. Carmakers wanting both have generally had to specify separate hardware, so folding them into one part changes the cost case for features that were previously hard to justify alone.

What UWB adds to the access-control toolkit

Anyone who works with RFID and NFC access control will recognise the problem being solved. Passive entry systems built on conventional key fob RF links have been picked apart by relay attacks for years, with two attackers quietly extending the link between a fob on a hall table and a car on the drive. Ultra-wideband closes that hole by measuring time of flight rather than signal strength. Operating in the 6 to 8.5 GHz range with very short pulses, it derives distance from pulse arrival time, giving centimetre-level ranging accuracy that is extremely difficult to stretch or spoof.

That secure ranging is what the Car Connectivity Consortium standardised in Digital Key Release 3, pairing Bluetooth Low Energy for discovery and session setup with UWB for the distance measurement itself. Interoperability is governed by the FiRa Consortium. Worth noting for this readership is that NFC has not been engineered out: the 13.56 MHz HF interface stays as the fallback credential, so a tap on the door handle still works when a phone battery is flat or UWB is unavailable. UWB complements the contactless credential stack rather than replacing it.

Presence detection and the NCAP timetable

The second use case is driven by regulation. Child presence detection is working its way into NCAP protocols in Europe and China, and the NCJ29D6 is positioned to meet it. The device uses UWB radar returns to identify subtle motion patterns consistent with occupant presence, then warns vehicle users that someone or something may still be in the cabin when the car is parked. NXP is careful to add that the driver retains full control of the vehicle and remains responsible at all times.

One radio, several features

The commercial logic is straightforward once the anchors are in the car. “NXP’s proven Trimension UWB platform maximizes value for OEMs, using a single system to deliver multiple new and differentiating features for drivers,” said Markus Staeblein, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Secure Car Access at NXP Semiconductors. “Digital key and presence detection are just the beginning. OEMs will be able to deliver additional UWB-based features, such as kick sensing, intrusion alert or automatic charging, as they establish the secure hardware platform in their vehicles.”

For BMW owners the visible result is a car that unlocks on approach, triggers a personalised welcome sequence and no longer needs a fob in a pocket. For the wider access-control industry it is another data point in a familiar direction of travel: short-range identification is now a layered stack, with UWB doing the secure ranging, BLE the discovery, and NFC holding the line as the credential of last resort.

Image credit: Copyright © BMW AG

Read more at https://media.nxp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nxp-trimension-ultra-wideband-powers-bmw-groups-digital-key-plus

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

But earnings season has a way of cutting through narratives, and the Q2 2026 results trickling in over the past two weeks tell a different story. Not a story of explosive growth or paradigm shifts, but something arguably more useful: a picture of an industry that has absorbed its correction, found new sources of demand, and is building momentum again on firmer ground.

The Bellwether Speaks

Start with Impinj, because everyone does. The Seattle-based chipmaker is the closest thing RFID has to a pure-play bellwether, and its July 29 report left little room for ambiguity. Revenue hit $108.4 million for the quarter, up 11% year-over-year and ahead of analyst estimates. Endpoint IC revenue, the segment that tracks actual tag chip shipments, reached a record $96.4 million, up 14% from a year earlier. Endpoint bookings hit an all-time high for the second consecutive quarter.

The numbers are strong on their own. What makes them significant is where the demand is coming from. Impinj noted that three of the five largest U.S. grocery chains are now either piloting or actively deploying RAIN RFID. That shift matters enormously. Apparel was the sector that dragged RFID into the mainstream over the past decade, and it remains a large and growing market. But apparel is now mature in RFID terms. The incremental growth story has moved to food, and food is a category with fundamentally different economics: higher volumes, faster cycle times, and regulatory tailwinds around traceability that apparel never had.

The Inlay Giants and the Grocery Bet

Avery Dennison, reporting today (July 30), sits at the centre of this transition. As the world’s largest RFID inlay manufacturer through its Intelligent Labels division, Avery’s results will fill in a critical piece of the puzzle. The street expects roughly $2.29 billion in total revenue, up about 3.1%, with earnings per share around $2.47.

The more telling detail comes from Q1, when Intelligent Labels posted a low-single-digit organic decline. Apparel held up, but food and logistics volumes were down by low double digits. That sounds bad until you consider the context. Avery has been explicit that its grocery RFID rollout is heavily weighted toward the second half of 2026, with bakery, meat, and deli categories coming online at scale with the largest U.S. grocer. The Q1 dip was the trough, not the trend, if management’s guidance holds.

There is also Avery’s Wiliot investment to consider. The ambient IoT platform, which uses batteryless Bluetooth tags that can be read by existing infrastructure, represents a longer-term bet on extending item-level visibility beyond what conventional UHF tags can reach. Whether that bet pays off in 2026 or 2028 is debatable, but it signals where Avery sees the market heading: toward pervasive, low-cost sensing at the individual item level.

The Semiconductor Layer: Recovery with Nuance

Move upstream to the semiconductor companies and the picture gets more nuanced, partly because RFID is one product line among many for these firms.

NXP Semiconductors reported $3.5 billion in Q2 revenue on July 28, up 19% year-over-year. Its Industrial and IoT segment, which houses many of its RFID reader and tag IC products, rebounded strongly to $755 million, a 38% increase. That rebound reflects the broader industrial recovery as much as RFID-specific demand, but it confirms that the inventory correction that plagued the segment through 2025 has largely worked through. The softer spot was Mobile, at $351 million and up just 6%, where NFC and secure element demand was more subdued.

STMicroelectronics delivered an even more emphatic beat on July 23. Revenue of $3.49 billion came in above guidance and 26% ahead of the prior year. Management referenced “tight supply” in certain product areas, a phrase the semiconductor industry had not heard in a while. For RFID specifically, STMicro’s announcement of new NFC and secure element chips incorporating post-quantum cryptography is worth flagging. As governments and enterprises begin preparing for the cryptographic transition, having quantum-resistant security baked into NFC ICs at the hardware level could become a meaningful differentiator.

Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics, often overlooked in Western coverage, issued a profit alert on July 8 projecting first-half revenue of RMB 2.2 to 2.4 billion, up 20-30% year-over-year. The company specifically named NFC RF products and RFID products as growth drivers. Fudan’s results are a reminder that the RFID market is not solely a Western story. Chinese manufacturers are shipping enormous volumes of HF and UHF tag ICs into domestic supply chains, and their growth rates currently outpace their European and American counterparts.

Access Control and Retail Software: Steady, Not Spectacular

ASSA ABLOY’s Global Technologies division, which includes HID Global, reported SEK 6,590 million in Q2 revenue on July 17, with 4% organic growth and a 19.7% EBIT margin. HID posted what management described as “good growth,” though it was held back by delayed non-critical industrial capital expenditure in Europe. Access control remains one of RFID’s steadiest verticals. It does not generate headlines, but it generates reliable, high-margin revenue, and the migration from legacy proximity cards to SEOS and mobile credentials continues to provide a multi-year upgrade cycle.

Nedap, the Dutch company whose iD Cloud platform has become a standard in retail RFID inventory management, reported first-half 2026 revenue of EUR 152.0 million on July 16, up 13% year-over-year, with operating margin expanding to 12.1%. Nedap’s results confirm that the RFID software and platform layer is growing faster than the hardware layer. Retailers who adopted RFID tagging years ago are now investing in the cloud analytics and inventory engine capabilities that turn tag reads into operational decisions. That is where the margin sits, and it is where Nedap has positioned itself effectively.

The ESL Adjacency

VusionGroup, which reports its first-half sales today, deserves a mention even though it is primarily an electronic shelf label company rather than a traditional RFID player. Its Q1 2026 revenue surged 34% year-over-year on the back of Walmart’s EdgeSense rollout, and the company sits at the intersection of in-store IoT, dynamic pricing, and item-level data capture. As ESL platforms increasingly incorporate RFID reader functionality and integrate with inventory management systems, the boundary between ESL and RFID is blurring. VusionGroup’s trajectory is relevant context for anyone trying to understand where in-store technology budgets are flowing.

What August Will Tell Us

Several important reports are still to come. Zebra Technologies, which reports August 4, will provide a read on RFID printer and fixed reader demand across warehousing and manufacturing. Infineon, reporting August 5, will shed light on its Connected Secure Systems segment, where secure RFID and NFC products sit alongside its broader security portfolio. Identiv, on August 6, is in a unique position: after divesting its physical security business, the company is now a focused specialty RFID and IoT inlay maker. Its Q1 revenue jumped 40% year-over-year, though some of that was flattered by pull-forward orders. Whether that pace holds will indicate how durable the specialty tag demand is.

Further out, SATO Holdings (August 12) and CCL Industries’ Checkpoint Systems division (August 13) will round out the picture. Checkpoint’s Q1 was flat with operating income down 15%, suggesting that retail loss prevention, its primary RFID use case, has not yet benefited from the same tailwinds lifting other segments.

The Private Side of the Market

Not all the important players report publicly. Smartrac, once the world’s largest RFID inlay manufacturer, is now fully absorbed into Avery Dennison’s Intelligent Labels operation. Beontag, the Brazilian consolidator, has been on an acquisition spree, absorbing Confidex and LAB ID to build a global tag manufacturing platform. Alien Technology continues to serve high-volume UHF markets. Invengo, based in China, has carved out a strong position in textile and laundry RFID, a niche that demands ruggedized tags and closed-loop reliability. Nordic ID maintains its foothold in handheld readers across European markets. And Paragon ID is riding the IATA mandate for RFID-enabled baggage tracking, a rollout that is still in its early stages across global aviation.

These private players collectively represent a substantial share of global RFID production. Their absence from public earnings calls makes the industry harder to read in aggregate, but the signals from their publicly traded customers and partners suggest they are benefiting from the same recovery dynamics.

Reading the Recovery

So what do the Q2 2026 numbers actually tell us? A few things stand out.

First, the correction is over. Impinj’s record bookings, NXP’s industrial rebound, STMicro’s tight supply commentary, and Nedap’s margin expansion all point to an industry that has moved past the destocking cycle of 2025. IDTechEx’s estimate of approximately 55 billion tags shipped in 2025, which implies a 10% increase and a US$15.6 billion market growing to US$23 billion by 2036 at roughly 3.9% CAGR, provides a structural baseline that the cyclical data is now converging toward.

Second, the growth driver has shifted. Apparel RFID is not declining, but it is no longer the marginal source of new demand. Food and grocery are taking that role, and the economics are compelling: higher tag volumes per store, faster replenishment cycles, and regulatory requirements around food traceability that create genuine switching costs once a retailer commits. The fact that three of the five largest U.S. grocers are now in deployment with Impinj, and that Avery Dennison is tooling up for a major second-half grocery push, suggests this is not speculative. It is happening.

Third, the software and platform layer is outgrowing the hardware layer. Nedap’s 13% revenue growth and margin expansion illustrate a pattern that will likely accelerate. As the installed base of tagged items grows, the value shifts from selling tags to selling the analytics, inventory engines, and cloud platforms that interpret the data those tags generate.

Fourth, security is becoming a product differentiator. STMicro’s post-quantum NFC chips and the ongoing migration from legacy HF credentials to modern secure elements in access control signal that cryptographic capability is moving from a checkbox feature to a genuine selling point.

None of this means the RFID industry is out of the woods entirely. Logistics remains soft. European industrial CapEx is delayed. The private-label tag market in China is growing fast but pricing is aggressive. And the macro environment, with its tariff uncertainties and cautious enterprise spending, could still trip up the recovery.

But the Q2 2026 earnings paint a picture of an industry that has absorbed its correction, diversified its demand base, and begun to grow again on more sustainable foundations. After a bruising 2025, that counts as good news.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The ST54M represents a significant step forward in mobile security architecture. By integrating PQC hardware acceleration directly into the chip, STMicroelectronics is addressing a challenge the industry has been anticipating for years: the eventual ability of quantum computers to break widely used public-key cryptography algorithms. The chip supports ML-KEM and ML-DSA, two algorithms selected by NIST as part of its post-quantum cryptography standardisation effort.

What makes the ST54M particularly notable is its convergence approach. Rather than requiring separate components for NFC, secure element, eSIM, and cryptographic processing, the single-die design consolidates these functions into one package. For device manufacturers, this means reduced board space, simplified supply chains, and a more streamlined integration process.

The chip includes an enhanced RF front end designed to improve antenna performance, which is critical for reliable NFC communication in compact device form factors. A large onboard memory capacity allows the secure element to host multiple applications simultaneously, from contactless payment credentials and transit ticketing to digital identity documents and car keys.

Security protections extend beyond the PQC algorithms themselves. The ST54M incorporates countermeasures against side-channel attacks and fault-injection techniques, both of which are common vectors for extracting cryptographic keys from hardware. These protections are essential for maintaining the integrity of sensitive applications such as mobile payments and digital identity verification.

David Richetto, Vice President and Division General Manager of the Connected Security Group at STMicroelectronics, commented on the launch: “With ST54M, we are extending our mobile-convergence platform to help customers address evolving security challenges.”

The chip supports a broad range of NFC-enabled use cases including contactless payments, public transit ticketing, physical access control, digital driving licenses, connectivity management through eSIM, and digital car keys. This versatility positions the ST54M as a platform component rather than a single-purpose solution.

STMicroelectronics is targeting Common Criteria 2022 EUCC certification and EMVCo certification by July 2026, with sampling already available to customers and production expected to begin in July 2026. The company also offers certified software libraries, including NesLib-PQML and X-CUBE-PQC for its STM32 microcontroller family, to support the broader transition to post-quantum cryptography across its product ecosystem.

The timing of the ST54M launch aligns with growing industry urgency around PQC readiness. Governments and standards bodies worldwide have been pushing for a transition away from classical cryptographic algorithms before large-scale quantum computers become practical. For NFC-enabled applications that handle payment credentials, identity documents, and access tokens, the stakes of that transition are particularly high.

With nearly 49,000 employees and a customer base exceeding 200,000 organisations globally, STMicroelectronics continues to position itself at the intersection of connectivity, security, and mobile innovation.

Read more at https://newsroom.st.com/media-center/press-item.html/p4784.html

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The decision to establish a physical office in Saudi Arabia comes at a time when the Kingdom is investing heavily in large-scale infrastructure, smart city developments, and modern workplace environments. These projects demand sophisticated security solutions that can manage identities, assets, and access rights across both physical and digital domains. Nedap’s technology is well positioned to address those requirements, particularly in sectors such as oil and gas, government, healthcare, finance, education, and commercial real estate.

Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, Managing Director for the META and APAC regions, highlighted the strategic importance of the move. He described Saudi Arabia as a key growth market for Nedap, citing both the scale of current opportunities and the long-term development trajectory. By being closer to partners and end users, the company expects to improve collaboration on complex, large-scale security deployments that are becoming increasingly common across the region.

To lead the new operation, Nedap has appointed Junaid Ul Haq as Country Director for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Ul Haq emphasized that a local presence has become essential as projects grow in complexity, and that the office will help organizations support the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 ambitions. Vision 2030 has been a driving force behind much of the region’s modernization, creating demand for integrated security platforms that can scale with ambitious national projects.

Nedap’s product portfolio includes the AEOS access control platform, identity and access management solutions, mobile access capabilities, RFID readers, and locker management systems. All of these are built on open architecture, which allows for seamless integration with third-party systems. This interoperability is a critical factor for large organizations that need to unify diverse security technologies under a single management framework.

The RFID reader technology that Nedap offers plays a central role in modern access control deployments. These readers support multiple credential types, including NFC-based smart cards and mobile credentials, providing organizations with flexibility as they transition away from legacy badge systems. The open platform approach also means that enterprises are not locked into a single vendor ecosystem, a consideration that is increasingly important for government and critical infrastructure projects.

With the Saudi Arabian market poised for continued growth in smart building and security infrastructure, Nedap’s local office positions the company to compete for major projects while providing the hands-on support that complex deployments require. The move reflects a broader industry trend of global security technology providers establishing regional offices to better serve markets where demand for integrated access control and identity management solutions is accelerating.

Read more at https://www.nedap.com/en/news/nedap-expands-presence-in-saudi-arabia-with-new-office

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

How LF RFID Works

LF RFID systems operate within the 125 kHz to 134.2 kHz frequency band, with 125 kHz being the most widely adopted standard. At this frequency, electromagnetic waves have a relatively long wavelength, which gives LF RFID some distinctive physical characteristics.

The read range of LF RFID is typically limited to less than 10 centimetres. While this may seem like a limitation compared to HF or UHF alternatives, it is actually a deliberate advantage in many scenarios. A short, predictable read range means that tags are only detected when brought into close proximity with a reader, reducing the risk of unintended or accidental reads.

LF tags are predominantly passive, meaning they draw their operating power from the electromagnetic field generated by the reader. This eliminates the need for an on-board battery, keeping tags small, inexpensive, and virtually maintenance-free.

Why LF RFID Excels Near Metal and Water

One of the standout qualities of LF RFID is its resilience in challenging environments. Unlike higher-frequency RFID systems, which can suffer from signal reflection, absorption, or detuning when used near metal surfaces or in the presence of water, LF RFID performs reliably in both conditions.

The longer wavelength at 125 kHz is far less susceptible to interference from metals and liquids. This makes LF the preferred frequency for industrial settings, outdoor environments, and any application where tags may be exposed to moisture, mud, or metallic housings.

Key Applications of LF RFID

LF RFID technology is deeply embedded in several major sectors, each taking advantage of its ruggedness and dependable short-range performance.

Animal Tagging and Identification

LF RFID is the global standard for livestock and companion animal identification. Microchips implanted under the skin of pets, cattle, sheep, and horses operate at either 125 kHz or 134.2 kHz (the ISO 11784/11785 standard). These tiny glass transponders can last the lifetime of the animal, providing a permanent and tamper-proof form of identification. Farmers and veterinarians use handheld LF readers to scan animals quickly, supporting traceability, health records, and regulatory compliance.

Access Control

Proximity cards and key fobs used in building access systems are among the most familiar LF RFID applications. Technologies such as HID Prox and EM4100 operate at 125 kHz, enabling employees and residents to unlock doors by holding a card near a wall-mounted reader. The short read range is ideal here, as it ensures that only the card presented at the reader is authenticated, preventing cross-reads from nearby cardholders.

Automotive Immobilisers

Nearly every modern vehicle uses an LF RFID transponder embedded in the ignition key or key fob as part of its immobiliser system. When the key is inserted or brought close to the steering column, the vehicle’s reader energises the transponder and verifies its unique code. If the code does not match, the engine will not start. This passive, battery-free approach to vehicle security has dramatically reduced car theft rates worldwide since its widespread adoption in the late 1990s.

LF RFID: Still Relevant in a High-Frequency World

Despite the growth of NFC, UHF, and other wireless technologies, LF RFID continues to thrive in niches where its core strengths matter most. Its tolerance of metal and water, combined with a reliable and secure short-range read, makes it difficult to replace in animal identification, physical access control, and automotive security.

For organisations evaluating RFID solutions, understanding where LF fits into the broader frequency landscape is essential. It may not offer the speed or range of its higher-frequency counterparts, but when the application demands ruggedness, simplicity, and close-range precision, 125 kHz technology delivers.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

RFID Chips Embedded in Every Badge

Every ticket issued for the Masters Tournament now contains an embedded RFID chip. Augusta National’s own privacy policy makes no secret of it, stating that attendees consent to the club tracking badge locations through RFID readers positioned in and around Augusta National property. That network of readers gives the club real-time visibility into where each badge is at any given moment, including whether it has turned up at a known resale location.

The technology gives Augusta National something most event organizers can only dream of: a direct line of sight into the chain of custody for every single ticket. The moment a badge strays somewhere it shouldn’t, the club knows.

Severe Penalties for Resellers and Buyers

The RFID tracking doesn’t operate in isolation. Augusta National has paired the technology with a set of enforcement penalties that have made brokers and scalpers think twice. Original lottery winners whose badges are detected at resale locations face lifetime bans from the lottery, losing any future chance at attending the tournament. Long-term badge holders are stripped of their credentials entirely if a resale is detected. Anyone found on the grounds with a resold badge is removed immediately.

The club has been clear that it remains the only authorized source for tournament tickets, and it has shown a willingness to enforce that position with consequences that are effectively permanent for the individuals involved.

Secondary Market Takes a Hit

The results speak for themselves. What was once a booming resale operation near Augusta has nearly vanished. The ticket houses that used to operate in the area have closed up or moved on. One vendor told Yahoo Sports that only three badges were visible on StubHub for an opening round, listed at prices ranging from around $9,000 to nearly $70,000, a far cry from the days when inventory was plentiful.

SeatGeek, one of the larger ticket resale platforms in the US, announced early in 2026 that it would stop facilitating Masters ticket sales altogether, citing the pressure Augusta National continues to apply to secondary market vendors.

Some longtime Augusta brokers have adapted by selling directly during tournament week rather than through national platforms, but even that approach carries risk. As Nate Liberman from ticketing platform Tixr pointed out, the use of physical tickets creates a chain of custody problem that is difficult to work around when the issuer is actively monitoring badge locations.

A Model Other Organizers May Follow

Augusta National’s approach reflects a broader shift in how major event organizers are thinking about ticket distribution. By combining RFID tracking infrastructure with strict contractual penalties, the club has built a system that attacks the resale problem from two directions at once: technical detection and meaningful deterrence.

For the RFID industry, the Masters implementation is a high-profile example of what passive tracking at scale can accomplish in an access control and anti-fraud context. Whether other major sports and entertainment properties follow Augusta’s lead remains to be seen, but the results so far suggest the model is working.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The core proposition of the XPass Q2 is its native QR and barcode authentication capability. Rather than relying on a general-purpose camera, the device uses a dedicated scanning module built specifically for QR reads. This matters in practice because busy entrances rarely offer ideal conditions – the module is optimised to handle varying lighting environments, which is a common pain point when deploying QR-based access at outdoor gates or poorly lit reception areas.

Beyond QR and barcode, the XPass Q2 supports RFID card credentials alongside BLE and NFC-based mobile access. This combination means facilities do not have to choose between legacy card infrastructure and newer mobile or QR workflows – the XPass Q2 handles all of them from a single reader head. For sites currently running a mix of employee RFID cards, visitor QR passes, and member or ticket-holder barcodes, that kind of credential flexibility reduces the number of reader types needed at any given entry point.

The hardware is rated IP65, making it suitable for both indoor installations and outdoor deployment where exposure to dust and water is a concern. Adaptive feedback through LED indicators and audio cues helps maintain throughput at high-traffic entrances, giving users a clear confirmation without slowing the line.

On the software side, the XPass Q2 integrates natively with Suprema’s BioStar X platform, which handles unified visitor workflow management and provides an API for third-party system integration. For organisations that need dynamic QR functionality – where codes are generated on demand and expire after use – Suprema offers compatibility through its CLUe integration platform. This is particularly relevant for event ticketing and temporary visitor access scenarios where static credentials are a security liability.

Suprema CEO Hanchul Kim commented on the launch: “QR codes have become the standard credential for visitors and ticket holders,” pointing to the purpose-built design of the XPass Q2 as a response to that shift. The broader trend here is real – many facilities that previously issued proximity or smart cards to everyone are now dealing with a visitor and event population that expects to present a QR code from a smartphone rather than carry a physical card.

The XPass Q2 positions itself as a practical answer to that operational reality. By consolidating QR, barcode, RFID, BLE, and NFC into one device with an outdoor-capable enclosure and deep BioStar X integration, Suprema is targeting the segment of the market where access control complexity has been growing fastest: mixed-use facilities, stadiums, corporate campuses with high visitor volumes, and venues where ticketing systems need to talk directly to access control infrastructure.

Read more at https://www.supremainc.com/en/about/news-detail.asp?iBOARD_CONT_NO=8130&News_Type=Releases

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The new solution addresses a long-standing pain point for organizations that rely on separate systems and vendors to manage building entry and network authentication. Running parallel infrastructures creates security gaps, complicates audits, and drives up operational costs. HID Converged Credentials is designed to eliminate that fragmentation by delivering one phishing-resistant credential that works across both domains.

According to HID’s 2026 State of Security and Identity Report, which surveyed more than 1,500 security professionals, 75% of organizations have either deployed or are actively evaluating converged identity solutions. Meanwhile, 73% of physical security professionals identified identity management as a leading industry trend, and 60% said they plan to increase investment in this area. Perhaps most telling, 52% of respondents cited managing fragmented systems as their single greatest barrier to improving security posture.

The platform launches with three form factors. Crescendo Smart Cards provide a single card capable of handling both physical door access and digital authentication, with support for FIDO2, PKI, and OATH protocols. Security Keys offer portable FIDO2 and PKI authenticators for workstation logins and cloud application access. Micro Readers are compact NFC-enabled devices that allow employees to tap their credential at a workstation for seamless desktop authentication.

Daniel Gundlach, VP of North American Physical Access Control Solutions at HID, noted that customers are looking for simplicity. They want fewer vendors, less complexity, and a credential that works everywhere, he explained. Sean Dyon, VP of Authentication, added that the goal is to reduce complexity without compromising protection.

The converged approach reflects a broader shift in the security industry. As organizations adopt zero-trust frameworks and move more resources to the cloud, the gap between physical and logical security becomes harder to justify. A single credential that satisfies both requirements simplifies onboarding, offboarding, and ongoing compliance while reducing the attack surface that comes with managing multiple identity silos.

HID Global, headquartered in Austin, Texas, employs more than 4,500 people and operates in over 100 countries. The company is a subsidiary of ASSA ABLOY Group.

Read more at https://newsroom.hidglobal.com/hid-announces-converged-credentials-solution-bridging-physical-and-logical-identity-across

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The APEX Reader is built on what Wavelynx refers to as “The APEX Effect”. This framework emphasises three core design principles: infrastructure that lasts decades of change; solutions that adapt without compromise; and technology that evolves ahead of tomorrow’s challenges. In practical terms, this means the reader supports current and future credential types (including mobile credentials in Apple Wallet, Google Wallet and Samsung Wallet), advanced encryption, and a rugged build designed for harsh environments.

Key features of the APEX Reader include multiple form-factors (Mullion, Mullion Keypad, Single Gang and Single Gang Keypad) enabling installation flexibility across door types and entry points. The reader also supports credential freedom, allowing both legacy proximity cards and next-generation mobile credentials to operate seamlessly. Security extends to data transmission, with military-grade encryption (EAL 6+) safeguarding access events. Durability is addressed via a metal mounting plate, dust-proof and watertight enclosure, and wide voltage range capability (5-24 V) for varied installations. 

From an operational viewpoint this release is geared towards organisations that have traditionally faced high upgrade costs, compatibility issues and hardware lock-in. Wavelynx’s intent is clear: deliver a system that avoids the “install and replace every few years” cycle. As the company says, the goal is to turn access control from an operational burden into a strategic advantage. Although Wavelynx is US-based, the product is being positioned globally; for instance a UK-launch article reports a partner supply arrangement that will bring APEX Readers to European integrators.

What does this mean for the RFID and access-control industry? First, it highlights the ongoing shift from hardware-only innovation to holistic systems that combine credential ecosystems, mobile integration and lifecycle cost economics. Organisations are increasingly seeking solutions that do more than simply scan a card; they want integrated systems that can evolve with threats, regulation, user behaviour and enterprise growth. The APEX Reader is clearly targeting that trend.

Second, the support for “credential freedom” underscores a move away from vendor lock-in. The ability to accept legacy cards, smart cards and mobile wallets ensures that organisations can migrate to modern systems without discarding existing infrastructure. This is particularly relevant for large enterprises, campuses and high-security sites that have complex and varied legacy deployments.

Finally, the ruggedness and durability focus suggests the product is aimed not only at standard office or commercial installations, but also at more demanding environments such as education, industrial facilities, critical infrastructure and external doorways exposed to weather or tampering.

Wavelynx’s APEX Reader looks to be an advance in access-control hardware and infrastructure strategy. By combining flexible form-factors, credential support across generations, high-end security and rugged design, the product targets organisations looking to move away from frequent hardware refresh cycles, compatibility headaches and limited credential ecosystems. As physical access control becomes more entwined with mobile, cloud and IoT systems, platforms like the APEX Reader will play a critical role in bridging legacy and future-proof systems.

Wavelynx Press Release can be found here

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The reasons behind this seem to be animal welfare, to ensure that RFID tagging already used by the Animal Husbandry Department of Jammu and Kashmir be integrated into the tracking and those not already tagged must be ear tagged in a tamperproof manner. Furthermore, if a pony operator is found to have deliberately failed to tag or otherwise breaks the tag, they will not be able to trade and offer their services on the track.

The system also requires that the medical certificates for the animals be logged with the registration for the RFID tags and stored in the database along with the application record.

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This year is expected to be a very busy year for the pilgrimage after a 2 year break due to the pandemic, therefore tracking for peoples safety is critical during the 43 day pilgrimage to the shrine in the Hymalayas.

The RFID tags in the form of cards will be issued to all pilgrims and their vehicles, and visitors will be required to scan at regular checkpoints to ensure both tracking of individuals and also regulation on the flow of people to 20,000 per day.

Send us your News

If you have a story you think we would be interested in relating to RFID. A product launch, a new RFID technology or a successful RFID implementation project, please do not hesitate to send us your press release.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.