3 to 5 Years Away: UWB

There's this Chicago Tribune piece on ultra-wide band radio (free reg. required). It's basically "Bluetooth on steroids," as one guy put it.

With ultrawideband radio technology, you won't have to be a superhero to do such amazing things as see and talk through walls and send huge blocks of data wirelessly at ultrafast speeds. But UWB technology isn't quite ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Among other things, it must be tested to ensure it won't interfere with other radio signals. Here's an update on this potentially high-flying technology.

While nowhere in the article does it say "three to five years," UWB is something that I've read about off and on for the past I-don't-know-how-long and it seems to fall under the general "three to five years away super-tech" heading. It's kind of like that "infinite bandwidth over the power lines" thing that someone does a feature on every year--the drool factor is high, but so is the vapor factor. This article is good for getting acquainted with the tech and some of its claims, though.