China scales back RFID plan for '08 Olympics

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) has recently released news that they are scaling back the original plan to implement RFID at all Olympic events, in order to increase security and decrease counterfeiting.

RFID tickets will now only be used for the opening and closing ceremonies, and include personal information, passport information, email addresses and home contact information. Photos, which were originally planned to be incorporated, are not on the tickets that were released to the press, according to the article published today on Danwei.org.

Concerns of data hacking and delays upon entering events with the use of embedded RFID tags in all 6.8 million event tickets apparently weighed on the decision to revise the scope of the original plan.

China is no stranger to RFID technology, having surpassed the $500 million in 2007 – a 50 percent increase from the previous year (Networkworld.com). IDTechEx predicts that this trend with continue for the next few years, making China the largest market for RFID by value.

IDTechEx’s report breaks down the figures: “In 2008 the spend on RFID in East Asia will be $2.8 billion of $5.29 billion spent globally. The majority of this - $1.96 billion - is just in China.”

It reports the cost of China’s 220 million national identification cards and systems at around $1.65 billion just in 2008 -- of a $6 billion total commitment, “the largest of any RFID project in the world.”

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