What has prevented RFID from taking off until now?

There are well-developed standards for low- and high-frequency RFID systems, and these technologies are widely used. For instance, LF tags are used to track livestock around the world. HF is used in access control systems for buildings, ticketing applications, and automobile immobilizers. UHF is relatively new. The first UHF products didn’t reach the market until 2003, and the first ISO standard was not introduced for UHF until 2005. Another issue with UHF has been performance. Early tags were not always read reliably around water and metal, but the technology has improved greatly over the past few years. And finally, there have not been software solutions that take advantage of RFID data to solve business problems in specific industries. This is also starting to change, with more software solutions being introduced every year.