Vision - January/February 2009 - (Page 34) “UWB is starting to deliver on some of the promises that were made.” — Doug McEuen UWB Battling 60 GHz Wireless for Market Acceptance The market setbacks that ultra-wideband technology endured last fall with the closing of WiQuest and the decision by Intel to outsource rather than develop its UWB needs is not necessarily a boon to the competing 60 GHz wireless technology, says analyst Doug McEuen of ABI Research. “I don’t think it has a negative or positive effect on 60 GHz at this point; 60 GHz is so far from being a market-ready and viable high-volume production solution, that I don’t think it actually will have an impact on that market,” McEuen says of the UWB market developments. The analyst says the weakened economy will have more of an impact than the UWB setbacks which promise to deliver uncompressed HD video, audio and data transmission and is backed by the Wireless HD consortium. “It just creates a situation where there is less venture funding and money to be had,” McEuen says, “and at this point that’s what companies that will be doing Wireless HD will need.” UWB backers say 60 GHz technology is less refined than UWB wireless technology. For instance, 60 GHz signals drop as a transmitter and receiver move further apart or when obstructions come between them, says Dave Borison, senior marketing director at Tzero. “What happens when you’re watching the football game and your dog runs between the transmitter and receiver? Your video goes away,” Borison says. Borison says 60 GHz technology is not “scalable” for mobile devices because range drops as frequencies rise. “As you move up to 60 GHz, imagine how extreme that degradation in range will be,” Borison says. “What they try to do to overcome that path loss is they have power amplifiers. The problem is those amplifiers consume a lot of power.” For their part, backers of 60 GHz technology say they have a leg up on UWB when it comes to the vast array of regulatory hurdles their competitor faces. John Marshall, chairman of the Wireless HD consortium, says those regulatory challenges are testimony to the interference issues that could hamper UWB signals. “With Wi-Fi and ultra-wideband,” Marshall asserts, “there’s a lot of traffic in those bands. They’re very interference-heavy.” In contrast, Marshall says, 60 GHz operates in an “oxygen absorption band,” meaning oxygen interferes with 60 GHz—but only on long distances. “So if you’re short range, in home, oxygen does nothing,” he says. “But because it’s in that oxygen absorption band and because it’s a higher frequency, the regulatory community has said it’s okay to transmit at higher power.” Don’t Count It Out “There were dozens of other 10/100 startup companies at the time that were either acquired or have subsequently been lost to history,” Broockman said. “UWB is taking the same well trodden path of many other highly successful technologies that came before it: taking longer than most people thought, being declared dead a few times along the way, only to ultimately become a mainstay in our modern day life. UWB will be no different.” UWB was borne of the FCC’s authorization of a frequency band from 3.1 to 10.6GHz and operates at relatively low power transmit levels. Under the WiMedia UWB standard that later emerged from the WiMedia Alliance, the technology promised data transfer rates of 480 Mbps in a personal area network making obsolete the need for a twisted snake pit of wires and cables. But UWB stumbled when the technology did not live up to those data rates in its infancy. “One of the black eyes that UWB gave itself was that it promised 480 Mbps, and when some of the first-generation products came out it was in the 30 Mbps range, much lower than anticipated,” recounts analyst McEuen. “The 480 Mbps was the theoretical limit of the technology, which you’re not going to get in an actual working environment, and they really promoted that number. There was a gap with the market reality.” First-generation UWB products were sluggish in part because they ran wireless communications over a wired communications protocol stack, McEuen says. Now, however, wireless protocols are being embedded in second- and third-generation UWB products. “It’s not an adaptive model anymore,” the analyst says. “Now you have the appropriate software running into it. You’re starting to see product come out at 150, 180 and 200 Mbps. Now you’re starting to get that drastic difference between 802.11n and UWB. UWB is starting to deliver on some of the promises that were made.” Straddling Both the PC and CE Markets UWB has largely been the domain of the PC sector, which has introduced laptops and peripherals, including wireless docking stations and hard drives enabled with the technology. A big question has been www.ce.org 34 January/February 2009 http://www.ce.org
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