Range, accuracy, power and infrastructure pull against each other, and the site usually decides before the datasheet does. This is the comparison, with the trade-offs stated rather than implied — including the cases where the honest answer is two links rather than one.
| Link | Range | Accuracy | Battery life | Infrastructure | Cost per point |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NFC | Under 10 cm | Identity, not position | Passive or years | Reader at point of use | Very low tag cost |
| RFID (UHF) | 1–12 m | Portal or zone | Passive | Readers at choke points | Lowest tag cost |
| BLE | 10–100 m | Zone to a few metres | 1–5 years | Gateways on site | Low |
| UWB | 10–50 m | Sub-metre | Months to 2 years | Anchor network on site | Higher, both tag and anchors |
| LoRaWAN | 2–15 km | Coarse, or GNSS-assisted | Years | Gateway and network server | Low, once gateways exist |
| Cellular with GNSS | Wide area | Metres outdoors | Weeks to years | Operator coverage only | Higher, plus data plan |
| NTN satellite | Global | Metres outdoors | Lower per message | Sky visibility | Highest per message |
What granularity does the answer need? Which building, which room, or which bay. Most requirements stated as which bay turn out on examination to be which room, and that difference is the entire cost of a UWB anchor network.
Does the asset leave the site? If it does, a site-infrastructure link alone cannot follow it, and a wide-area transport is required for at least part of the journey.
What infrastructure already exists? Wi-Fi coverage, a LoRaWAN gateway, RFID portals at doors. Reusing what is installed is frequently the difference between a viable business case and a rejected one.
How often must it report, and for how long? Reporting policy dominates battery life far more than cell chemistry, so this question determines the energy budget more than the link choice does.
BLE for zone-level to few-metre accuracy with multi-year battery life and modest infrastructure; UWB where sub-metre accuracy genuinely matters and an anchor network is affordable; RFID where portal reads at choke points are sufficient. The right answer depends on whether the question is which room or which bay.
Yes, and it is often the correct architecture. A device that uses BLE indoors and cellular with GNSS outdoors produces one continuous asset history rather than two partial ones.
Because it is quoted against an assumed duty cycle at room temperature. Real reporting intervals, real temperature ranges and real retry behaviour on marginal coverage all shorten it, sometimes by a large factor.
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