Alcatel-Lucent
I think you mean
Alcatel was a French company.
Some uses for RFID chip.
Point of sale (pricing, inventory)
Theft control in retail spaces
Logistics + shipping - containers, trucks, palettes, boxes, etc. marked with RFID tags that can be read from some distance away.
Unique tags for every item - identification of items.
Marking of pharmaceutical packages for tracking, tracing, batch identification, dispensing.
Retail inventory - easier to scan and see what's on the shelf. Can be automated.
There's a spec for assigning unique ID numbers to items in retail. Probably specs for all kinds of other RFID-marked items by now, too. Each item with a universally-unique ID number.
Of course RFID could be really helpful to the military with logistics, tagging items and containers and palettes that are going to be transported and set up at a location.
Just a few uses that I recall, did not look it up. I'm sure by now there are lots more uses that were not envisioned 10 years ago.
RFID chips were going to become so dirt cheap that it was going to become feasible to put them into almost every product at insignificant cost. That has probably already happened.
They are passive devices with a little semiconductor chip that contains a small memory (hundreds of bits), and a tiny antenna that usually takes the form of a flat coil. An RFID chip can be as small as the period on a sentence. Probably smaller now that 10 years have passed since what I knew. The chip has no power source and it is powered when the antenna receives a pulse from the RFID reader. The RFID transponder then sends out its signal with the digital data stored in its memory.
An RFID chip can be erased or new data can be written on it. Erasure and writing requires different hardware than the simple RFID reader.
There is a near-field RFID spec (a few feet) and a more distant RFID spec (hundred feet?) that requires more power.
If a person happens to be carrying a lot of garments or other personal items that have RFID tags on them, each tag with a unique number, that makes for an interesting way to identify that specific individual. I knew a person who tried to patent this idea to prevent anybody else from patenting it. They did NOT want to see it get into use and they hoped to block its use by filing the patent. I never found out what happened.
You can destroy an RFID device by microwaving it. You can also isolate it with aluminum foil, probably.