Telematics and navigation group director Dominique Bonte says, “With a lot of regulations and legislation being introduced in the aftermath of 9/11, expectations that this industry would finally take off were high, prompting many vendors to enter this market with advanced solutions. While RFID-based point solutions at port yards are becoming more established—at least in North America and Western Europe—uptake of more advanced GPS-based solutions has been disappointing.”

At the same time, end-to-end visibility, monitoring, and tracking are becoming more important in an increasingly competitive and security-challenged container transportation industry where cheaper and safer container transport is urgently needed. While this will represent another strong driver for the uptake of GPS-based tracking in the future—though some players still claim tracking of containers during maritime transport on ocean liners is not a major requirement—the coexistence of different technologies, such as OCR, RFID, RTLS, and GPS, will remain the default situation, with slow migration from legacy systems, such as OCR, to RFID/RTLS, later followed by a more aggressive uptake of GPS/cellular-based solutions. wt