Ultrawideband renews high-speed wireless hopes
Ultrawideband (UWB) is shaping up as a high-speed wireless technology for the enterprise, but before its success can be assured, it must first navigate the complexities of industry working groups. Specifications for UWB, including 802.15.3a, are being forged by a task group of the Wireless Personal Area Networking (WPAN) working group, a subset of the IEEE. The task group's charter carries a broad mandate that goes beyond streaming, encompassing all of what it calls “time-sensitive file transfers” such as media content.
Until now, UWB's main sphere of influence has been in consumer electronics, enabling applications to run multiple high-definition television video streams among several devices in a home or to instantly display camcorder output without cables, for example.
The technology’s capabilities, however, have since caught the eye of the enterprise.
Using extremely short and broad low-power pulses to convey information, this flavor of UWB would operate at speeds of 110Mbps at 10 meters and 480Mbps at 1 meter. At such rates, UWB could offer speeds equivalent to those of USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394/FireWire across short distances. Some analysts also speculate that UWB could develop into an alternative to Bluetooth in the future.
