While it awaits a pending acquisition by SBC Communications, AT&T is not resting on its innovation laurels. The carrier recently announced plans for what is believed to be the first managed radio frequency identification (RFID) service by a telco. Eric Shepcaro, vice president of business strategy and development for AT&T, recently spoke with Telephony's Dan O'Shea about the carrier's plans and hopes for the new service.

On RFID as a managed service: We hear from a lot of our enterprise customers that they don’t want to have to certify their own technologies. That’s something that they might not be staffed for, and they want to outsource. The other part of our inspiration to do this is that we feel we have a leadership position in managed services for enterprise. RFID is where that’s going next.

On whether or not you need a mobile network for RFID: We have an expertise and a heritage in both wireline and wireless. We have expertise in Wi-Fi hotspots and wireless LANs, and in managing those things. We have extensive capabilities in wireless access, including wireless access to VPNs. Wide area mobility is not an important part of this service. We can handle the capabilities needed for managing wireless in a campus environment. We have spent the last year building an ecosystem of partners in this space to address the various aspects of RFID, and we think the market is ready for this now.

On potential customers: There are customers now for a managed RFID service. We are targeting different groups. We are targeting verticals, such as manufacturing and retail and healthcare--verticals that have very large and complex supply chains that RFID can integrate with. We are targeting the government sector. Basically, we are going after a lot of very large entities, companies that have told us they want something like this, but there will also be some smaller customers as well for whom RFID is in demand.

On the market potential of RFID: We are doing a trial with several customers before we launch the commercial service. We are going to take the results of that trial into account as we launch this and go forward with RFID. Everyone has heard a lot about RFID for a while now. This is a market that we think has gone through the hype cycle already. The market is ripe now. It’s growing 35% to 40% per year. Some of the numbers we’ve seen suggest there will be a $2 billion market by 2008 for RFID services.

On the importance of joining EPCglobal U.S.: We joined [the Electronic Product Code network’s U.S. organization] because RFID standards continue to evolve, and we want to help shape those standards. Our offerings will support the EPCglobal Network’s architecture.