A white paper by Reva Systems likens the situation today with RFID to the evolution of the commercial Internet ten years ago:

"Flash back again ten years ago -- there were no products designed to deliver reliable Internet service and manage bandwidth among multiple business users. The underlying infrastructure at the time was based on products designed for the old days of private-line wide area service; they were expensive and complicated to deploy. Corporate Internet use 10 years ago often meant installing Mosaic-based software onto a desktop PC or workstation, then loading someone else's IP routing software to a server to support access to the predominantly academic Internet via expensive private-line services. Out of necessity, many small and medium sized businesses had to work with connections multiplexed though racks of low speed dial-up modems.

The effort and investment was hard to justify back in those days, and it was hard to make a business case for deploying internet access infrastructure to support just one department's point application. Many people ten years ago questioned the ROI of a corporate Internet mission, given such limited functionality and administrative toil. Few visionaries could foretell global Internet based e-commerce as we use it today. No one imagined the interactive simplicity of instant messaging. The mass market for residential broadband was inconceivable back when a single high speed internet connection cost $700 to $1,000 to install and corporations were paying up to $10,000 per month for a 1.5 Mbps T-1 line. RFID projects hold great promise for the future, but face similar early life cycle cost concerns today.

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In ten years RFID's real value will be recognized as a new fabric of business automation with its own established ways of indispensable legacy. In ten years, none of it will happen without a reliable and repeatable RFID infrastructure that makes today's emerging ROI propositions look like the Internet investment you wish you'd made ten years ago."

Not too long ago I likened RFID to the mobile phone. So why not compare it to the Internet?

Download the white paper at RFID Solutions Online (requires free registration).