Online auction companies getting into telecommunications, and telecomms getting into RFID -- what is the world coming to next?

"AT&T today announced customer trials starting early next year of a managed, end-to-end, hosted Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) service, making AT&T the first U.S. network and managed services provider to offer such a service.

AT&T today also announced that it has joined EPCglobal US, an affiliate of EPCglobal Inc, serving subscribers in the United States to help foster the adoption of the EPCglobal Network� and related technology. The EPCglobal Network combines RFID technology, existing communications network infrastructure, and the Electronic Product Code (EPC) to enable accurate, cost-efficient visibility of information in the supply chain.

During the 90-day RFID service trials, AT&T will design, deploy and manage integrated, end-to-end RFID solutions, which extend from AT&T's IP network and Internet Data Centers into customer-premises infrastructure, including RFID readers, edge devices and software, local area networks, firewalls and routers. Although AT&T customers have been using the company's services to piece together their own custom-built RFID solutions for some time, the new AT&T service integrates its services---network integration and consulting, IP transport, hosting, storage, managed applications and security---into a single managed service specifically for RFID.

The managed RFID service is intended to help businesses and government agencies rapidly deploy and scale trusted end-to-end RFID solutions without significant capital investment, while securely storing and protecting their RFID data in AT&T's Internet Data Centers. The service is designed to support contactless payment, the latest trend in retail payment applications because of its speed and convenience, as well as Asset Tracking, asset management and security applications for the manufacturing, transportation, retail and government sectors."

This is big news. AT&T is the first major entity stepping up to the plate to create a hosted (or to use an old-fashioned term "ASP") type of RFID service that I know of.

The above quote is taken verbatim from the press release issued this week. I don't know anything more about the announcement, but I plan to dig in and learn more.

Meanwhile, take a look at the paper describing the EPCglobal Network (PDF).