Staccato Proclaims UWB Technology Isn't Dead 31
MojoKid writes "Earlier this month, Ultra-Wideband mainstay TZero closed its doors, leaving the once hopeful format in limbo. One of the few UWB supporters still hanging around is Staccato Communications, and not surprisingly, its CEO is stepping up to address the overall situation and assure the general public that the wireless format it supports is far from dead. In a long-winded note from the desk of Marty Colombatto, he frankly states that 'to conclude that "UWB is dead" is a gross misinterpretation of recent events and ignores the lessons of relevant history.' Potentially the most interesting tidbit is that UWB is supposedly getting a 'makeover' this year. Marty even goes so far as to say that new developments in 2009 are sure to breathe new life into the technology.'"
Update 2/22 at 17:41 by SS: Reader coldmist pointed out a related Ars Technica piece looking into the state of wireless HD video, which contains some interesting information about UWB.
Netcraft (Score:1)
It's not dead yet (Score:2)
It's going for a walk and it feels happy!
UWB for Video (Score:5, Informative)
Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] recently had a great writeup on the state of wireless video, which included a lot of info on UWB.
It's worth a read.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And Intel wrote a UWB Linux stack that was merged in 2.6.28. And they're producing UWB chips. Which means that long-term Intel is going to put UWB chips in all the mobos that use their integrated stuff.
UWB doesn't seems "dead" to me, it looks more like an emerging technology.
Re: (Score:2)
The big question is: Does it have enough legs to get it over the engineering hump and into real life.
Right now, it's questionable. Chicken and egg problem.
Even though it's feasible, is there enough money, need, and ambition in it *right now* to still get it to market?
Not sure.
And, considering some of the players are exiting, it doesn't bode well.
Re: (Score:2)
One of the big applications of UWB is in wireless USB. Intel is a (well, the) big USB developer/backer. It makes sense they'd want this. It could be UWB AV connects take the long route into the market: first they're available as addons, then they're built into Intel's next line of laptop chipsets. Then device makers will release wireless usb widgets, then TV makers will think about UWB interlinks.
I haven't heard about UWB in a while but..... (Score:3, Interesting)
UWB seemed to be the promise of a completely wireless future. I remember them saying that it would eliminate interference, be much, much faster, and cover a much larger area. How many of those things are still true? It seems to me that transmission strength is a huge limitation on any wireless device. Since UWB theoretically covers the whole spectrum, I still fail to see how it does not cause at least some level of interference with other devices. Even a strobing effect across the spectrum would cause some level of signal degradation with other radio based devices. I guess I should just read some more about it.
From the wikipedia article:
UWB communications transmit in a way that doesn't interfere largely with other more traditional 'narrow band' and continuous carrier wave uses in the same frequency band. However first studies show that the rise of noise level by a number of UWB transmitters puts a burden on existing communications services. This may be hard to bear for traditional systems designs and may affect the stability of such existing systems.
So interference is such a problem that transmission strengths are vastly reduced to close proximity devices, hence the adoption of UWB for PAN. So the advantage is purely that UWB is really fast? I hate to say it I don't think anything is going to really compete with 802.11x. Unless Intel starts including it in its chipsets or dell starts throwing it on their notebooks, I doubt it will ever leave the niche market. I mean look at 802.11n, very few people are actually using it in their homes yet, and probably won't be for some years. People like to just plug in stuff and have it work. WiFi is so pervasive now that I can't really imagine anything taking over in the short to mid term. When your average fiber connection in the home is running at 200mbps, people might start caring that their network is suddenly "slow."
Re: (Score:2)
I've been using N at home for a couple of years now.
Mostly because B was just always dreadfully slow (nothing like a 10Mbit wired connection), and my G routers got fried when the washing machine decided to die and take as much other equipment as it could with it*. Works very nicely, range is pretty good.
UWB is an interesting tech, I for one welcome the idea of less wires everywhere.
*Yes, I now have surge protectors and a small UPS
Re: (Score:2)
UWB is great, but it is just another form of modulation. The same principles apply to the older modulation techniques apply in the same way to UWB (such as a channel's carrying capacity at a certain bandwidth, dynamic range, error rate). It ain't magic, and doesn't have any mysterious abilities (some have been postulated, none have been proved). The only real advantage I see in it is that it can be a form of modulation that is time (rather than frequency) based, so it maps well with our most common comput
Wireless USB (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:1)
What are the security implications for giving free access to a bubblejet to anybody within a 5 meter radius?
Because then anyone in a 5 mile radius can see your tax returns (or other sensitive documents) when you print them?
Re: (Score:2)
5 miles -> Security risk
5 meters -> No risk whatsoever
Re: (Score:1)
UWB? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What is UWB? Please answer so 1,000 plus /. users slashdot google looking for the answer.
Google wouldn't even notice when 1,000 people all search on something at the same time if they didn't do heavy statistical analysis.
Re: (Score:2)
Turns out it is Ultra-wideband [wikipedia.org], some kind of radio spectrum. Reading the wikipedia summary didn't help much but I'm no physics/electronics nerd. "UWB has been a proposed technology for use in personal area networks" and "due to the short duration of the UWB pulses, it is easier to engineer extremely high data rates".
Re: (Score:1)
Bluetooth is a channel hopping transport. Where it and the other participants agree where to meet next with for the next portion of their exchange. But they only use one of the many channels at a time.
UWB I think still hops but hops using 10, 20 or so of the channels in parallel.
I think. Hence you get a fat pipe instead with some of the robustness benefits of the channel hopping approach.
UWB Was Destined To Die (Score:5, Interesting)
I designed an UWB receiver for one of the UWB startups 3-4 years back. UWB has a few problems from the start that make it a POS --
1. The wideband nature of the beast and the fact that it uses a roughly 250MHz wide channel. (Its OFDM modulation on a a multichannel structure with 200+ parallel channels) - When You get to the practical nature of the beast, the receiver structures require huge huge amounts of power. UWB's radiated at the antenna power is low, but the amount of juice sucked in to power the beast is huge.
2. Due to (1) its never going to be battery powered. Power cord is a must have. So much for "wireless" duh....
The UWB proponents tried to sell UWB as a way to kill off the interconnect cords for TV-DVR-DVD-BlewRay ;) systems. Well, you still got to power plug them so whats the big deal??? Besides, most of that stuff is a "plug once and forget" thing, so its really not that big a deal.
Re: (Score:2)
The Ugly here was a bit more specific than impedance match. The channel BW was 250ish MHz, and modulation was OFDM, with those two things you got to create a 500MHz ADC to convert to get into a DSP system to sort the OFDM signal out. Add a mixer and down converter and the thing sucks so much power its got to have a power cord. Dead in the water, and most RF IC designers predicted that 5 years back.
intel's UWB? (Score:1)
There was another UWB competing with the intel camp UWB, but intel was/is so bent on owning everybody's pipes that they squashed it even when the other UWB's backing vendor (Motorola/Freescale) essentially offered it royalty-free. My impression was that the other UWB was set up to avoid this kind of issue, although I might be wrong.
(I personally know a test engineer who worked on it, so it's second person data for me.)
TZero's UWB technology works very well (Score:1)
ATSC? (Score:2)
Ironically... (Score:1)