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Ultra Wide Band standards
November 18, 2004
As early providers of Bluetooth solutions, we have been watching the emergence of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology with interest. The characteristics of this (originally military) technology make it ideal for inherently secure, very low power, very high bandwidth Personal Area Networks that are extremely robust to interference. Bluetooth's 1 Mbps and WiFi's 11 and 54 Mbps are left standing by the potential 480 Mbps of a UWB based standard. This standard is being shepherded into existence by the pithily named MultiBand OFDM Association .
So what? Good question - the pre-standard phase of such a technology is of necessity driven by the techies, but in order to succeed there must be early attention to the commercial possibilities and, just as importantly, commercial limitations. Bluetooth has its own colourful history in this respect - promising too much too early.
Multimedia streaming would seem to be an obvious first application area for UWB. Sony and HP, in a presentation to MBOA, identified 2 categories of application: Cut-the-cord applications that aim to make existing applications wireless, and WPAN applications that exploit new opportunities in ad-hoc wireless networks. In other words, the same as Bluetooth promised - and so far Bluetooth has only delivered on the first of these.
The Register has an interesting article on the politics of the MBOA.
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