Within the ESL (Electronic Shelf Label) user community there has been much talk of NFC (near-field-communication) as a feature of the labelling system with suggestions that NFC enabled electronic labels, would eliminate the need to have an Access Point in the store to enable communication between server and labels.

NFC technology is used for communication between devices in close proximity of one another. So NFC technology does indeed allow direct communication of an NFC-enabled device (say your mobile or PDA) with an ESL. Data from your mobile device is transferred directly to the ESL over Bluetooth communication technology and the mobile device itself communicates with the Server over the Internet, effectively bypassing the need for any AP device.

Advantages: Eliminating the AP device from the configuration offer a notable cost saving in particular for small stores with small number of ESLs or where the store itself is not permananetly connected to Internet. It also offers quick on the spot changes to be made on a given ESL.

Disadvantages: Since NFC is designed for communications over very short distances, the mobile device and the ESL to be communicated with need to be placed in close proximity of one another. This means that data for only a single ESL can be changed at any point in time. Where many ESLs require data updates, each ESL update operation needs to be repeated many times by physically placing the mobile device near the ESL. Such a process where many ESLs are involved would be very time consuming task potentially negating many advantages of usinhg ESLs in the first place.

So, whilst NFC data communication is a great feature offered by most ESL providers, for any reasonable size store with more than a handful of ESLs, relying solely on this feature means forgoing many other features and benefits offered by an AP based system, as such NFC should be considered as a great feature of the labelling system but not the sole communication functionality of the labelling system specially when large scale systems are considered.