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Ultra Wideband - Wireless Turkeys 2008
Why is it a turkey?
Ultra Wideband was supposed to replace those tangled messes of cables that link PCs to printers, monitors, keyboards and other peripherals as well as show up inside mobile phones, cameras and printers to deliver wireless broadband at speeds up to 480 Mbps for distances up to 3 meters and 110 mbps at 10 meters. Seemingly in perpetual development, UWB won't be coming to a retailer near you in a big way as expected this year.
In fact, UWB's promise is more of a dream now that UWB chip maker WiQuest went out of business at the end of October. And few chipmakers, such as Intel, are emphasizing the technology. Alereon, which recently announced it would acquire the USB assets of Stonestreet One, appears to be the only chipmaker dedicated to making a product.
The FCC gave its blessing to the UWB back in 2002, but to date, Toshiba and Lenovo are the only manufacturers offering wireless USB, a UWB-enabled version of the standard USB technology found in PCs today.
Comments (3) | Post a comment
They're Cooked: Wireless Turkeys from 2008
Comments
Posted by Jackie Green | November 20, 2008 - 4:30pm
Not all UWB is a turkey, you just have to know how to work with it. You may want to check out Audio-Technica's "SpectraPulse" Ultrawide band wireless microphone system. You can see it at audio-technica.com website. (Can't post link here)
Posted by Anonymous | November 21, 2008 - 4:31am
WiMedia overshadowed the whole UWB space with their now discredited solution that was really a bunch of narrow band carriers grouped together to fill the FCC spectrum mask so they could be called UWB. True impulse based UWB is out there if you know where to look. The stuff from Audio-Technica is one and another one is Pulse-LINK who has what is probably the best UWB solution out there working wirelessly and on Coax cable at 1Gbps+.
Posted by Anonymous | December 1, 2008 - 4:01pm
There were obstacles on development of UWB, similar to any other technology. Delivering "Giga bits per second" from a low cost and low power radio, and enabling high density network of users is not a medium level challenge. With FCC's smart move to make huge bandwidth available for UWB, UWB as a technology has got the strongest foundation (to date) to enable low power & high data rate applications. WiMedia approach has no fundamental problem, but early implementations were short-sighted with narrow-band limitations. New generations and right products for mass volume targets are coming out, agree that it will be slower than predicted. After all, the market demand is there, name what other technology can fill the need if not UWB?
