As part of a wider effort to measure and improve the quality of postal services throughout the Middle East, Qatar Post recently completed a trial of several RFID systems. The tests, which were conducted in cooperation with the postal operations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, could pave the way for the use of cost-effective RFID technologies to track mail around the world.
The trial placed Motorola fixed RFID readers along with antennas from Motorola and other suppliers in mail processing centers in the three Arab nations. Anonymous envelopes containing RFID tags, addressed and tagged by an independent party, were posted with regular mail. The letters were detected by readers placed at the entries of sorting centers and again as they exited the centers, building a database of the processing time for mail.
Qatar Post plans to use the collected information to make short and long term improvements to its system, improving routing and delivery processes. The trial may also provide insights which speed the adoption of RFID by postal companies around the world, offering them a measurement matrix for international deliveries as mail crosses borders from one national carrier to another.
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