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A House Divided: UWB's Double Standards
Mai writes "What happens when two coalitions within a standard come into conflict, and it doesn't get resolved quickly? The ultrawideband technology standard shows you."
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DVD+/-RW happens.
Karma: bad (mostly unaffected by funny mods)
Is that the answer? Because let me tell you, a bunch of geeks in a hand-to-hand fight to the death would kick ass. Pay per view ratings would be through the roof!
We don't have all the answers, but we know it involves executives from Intel and Motorola sticking their hands up the FTC and ITU commissioners' asses and some sort of sock-puppet Kabuki theatre.
It was considered a military secret early on, because it has applications such as "spotting stealth planes" and "looking through walls."
They can't decide which.
If we'd waited for standardization for 56k modems, we'd have waited an extra three years. Instead we had x2 and k56 flex for a little while. Was that a bad thing? No, not really. It took the pressure off the final v.90 standard, so they could take the time and get it right.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"ultrawideband" made me think of my ex-wife's ass.
Trolling is a art,
Double standards...It's like when me and a friend turn in the exact same homework, and he gets an A+ while I get a B-.
"The Matrix has you."
It's so obvious, I'm surprised that no one thought of this before!
If you want to thank me for this suggestion, please reply with your thanks under this thread.
You're welcome.
Standards in Artificial Intelligence are just as difficult to set. No particular body or coalition has the God-given authority to set standards, so we just have to let the standards evolve.
You must be her new husband. Good luck, you'll need it.
Trolling is a art,
Next you'll make fun of my $10,000/year salary and my 3" member. I will not stand for that!
If you persist in this fashion, I will challenge you to a AD&D match! And then you may be sorry.
what is the name of that RF shielding paint again?, might as well put on a coat or two before putting up my new tin foil wallpaper...
When Standards Coalitions Attack, next on FOX!
From the article:
a signal spread out so broadly that it just looks like background noise if you aren't the one it's aimed at.
Would pose a problem for SETI if this is what all the other intelligent civilizations are doing.
Because when a standard does come up, it might be broken. Standards often deal with legalities... so shipping a product that doesn't meet standards may in fact break some laws in various countries. I think this quote summarizes it well enough:
What good does it do you to have a cell phone and a PDA that can exchange data, if they are required by law to be powered off the moment you leave the country? For that matter, this also increases manufacturing costs, and thus consumer costs, decreasing sales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFDM
After reading this, it seems pretty clear that Motorola backs cdma-based solution just because it has already invested huge amounts in (w)cdma-based technologies, already having lots of patents giving it more royalties, not because of it's technological merits.
Bloodshed? Radiological bombs? Thunderdome? Dogs and cat sleeping together? Befuddled Slashdot posts? Snow in California? More Star Wars prequels? The Battle Of Hastings? The Magna Carta? The Cotton Gin? I dunno, man! I wasn't expecting a quiz! You're harshing my buzz!
--- Ban humanity.
of course, it's probably relative...
Hold a geek AD&D DDR deathmath to settle the matter. Sell tickets -- to get out. You'll make several fortunes!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's what you get when you put the standard before the technology. Step one: let companies use whatever standard is convenient for them, and sell their products to whomever they can convince to buy. Step two: once the market has tested the products, standardize based on best current practices.
Sure, it has the net result of lots of poor guys owning a collection of relatively useless Betamax videos, but really, I'd rather own an obsolete product because it made its best shot and failed than own a mediocre product because it conformed to a political compromise that had no market time behind it. (And furthermore, it encourages the Betamax owners to switch to DVD more quickly than the content and universally supported VHS owners, thereby even further spurring development.)
For real life examples, read some W3C Recommendations. The ones that were presented as ready-made standards before any market was actually implementing them (like PICS) are lovely pieces of technological poetry. The ones which were widely tested in the market and implemented first, even if in lots of non-compatible subversions, and only then standardized (like HTML), on the other hand, are actually used.
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
"looking through walls."
You mean my X-Ray glasses will really work someday?
From the article: "and how much of it has to do with optimistic investment in the path they thought the technology should take."
Pretty much all of it. It is very much a standard strategy to bet on a play, build up your IC and more importantly, patent portfolio, and then come out swinging.
You get a big jump on the competition.
This strategy is now starting to backfire as companies do this and then realize that while they are stuck in the standards process they aren't making any money. That means there only choice is to start selling product which isn't a standard.
Personally I'm actually very surprised that this hasn't already happened for UWB.
Absolute statements are never true
There's a book titled "In the Blink of an Eye," which details the Cambrian ecological explosion, which was precipitated, by (you guessed it), the emergence of vision among vertebrates. I expect a similar explosion for machines. In the modern era, we have rather well advanced robots, in terms of data sensing and actuators, but really crappy AI and control. The availability of decent remote control requires wireless video (who want's a robot attached to the wall?). UWB (or perhaps one of its successors) will make robotitcs fessible. With the coming shrinking of the labor pool due to the baby boomers retirement, there will be a demand for labor-saving technology, a void which robotics will be poised to fill.
As a former employee at a UWB startup, I can say that the whole process is screwed up. You have companies that recruit uncles and aunts of employees who aren't even remotely technical and fly them around to IEEE meetings so they can vote for the companies chosen standard. You also have companies like TI and Intel with huge 802.11 patent portfolios who are interested in pushing the MBOA spec so that UWB basically dies a horrible death. Or at least that was the perception at our company.
In any case, this stuff is at least 2 years away from consumers(at least for a full 802.15.3a implementation) and will probably be made pointless with advances in other technologies. Then again I'm a bit jaded, having been through the start-up spin cycle and all.
Once you start talking about frequencies, and channels, you might as well give up the game.
--Mike--
The FDA, who supposedly protects the US's food and health, will say a Mac and fries == two serves of vegetables (potatoes & tomatos used in the ketchup). EPA gets lobbied to hell by SUV vendors. Congress get fscked up by Christian campaigners.
Why be suprised when Microsoft or Intel or whatever contorts USB, networking specs,... to their advantage.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Darth Pants: I find your lack of PANTS disturbing...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The article asks "What good does it do you to have a cell phone and a PDA that can exchange data, if they are required by law to be powered off the moment you leave the country?"
Seems to me that it might still be a little useful, in spite of that limitation...
So far the non-standard approach failed to get hold in wireless. If one has a mobile unit, one expects it to work in different places, necessitaing the standard-based approach. Companies in the wireless LAN space that tried to ignore IEEE so far did it at their own peril - markets just refused to take off. Witness the failures of HiperLAN from a European-driven BRAN or a pure proprietary HomeRF play.
If you dig far enough back in the history of this, there were quite a few different approaches. About four years back, there were four main groups. iNTEL figured they had to lay their stake early, so they tried to muscle the other three out. eXtreme Spectrum had almost enough horsepower in their design to survive iNTEL's tactics, but finally had to turn to Motorola to bail them out.
Why Motorola? Good question. Many of the core group at eXtreme Spectrum had just been laid off from Motorola, or had jumped before the layoffs.
Why does iNTEL want this?
This short-distance UWB is potentially going to replace all the wires on your information devices except for the power wires. If you were into patents, wouldn't you like a patent on wire? ("Patent on wire" was something of a buzz phrase during the infighting.)
(Personally, I'm wondering if the XS/Freescale technique techniqe might be beneficial in power wires, but I don't know what I'm talking about.)
If you ask me, though, iNTEL's idea of jumping from spectrum to spectrum seems to have the larger footprint, the higher susceptibility to eavesdripping and being dripped on, and the greater power requirements. It might scale to greater distance, but that might not be desirable for short-distance, high-bandwidth wireless.
The XS/Freescale approach of basically spitting raw bits into the air at pseudo-random frequencies and very low power should be familiar with a crowd that understands crypto. You remember the story about the actress and the piano player and an early patent in the field.
But, again, I don't know what I'm talking about, so my biases might be showing.
Frankly, this is no surprise to those of us who have seen the standardisation process at work for a number of years. I work in mobile telecomms, so no surprise if I take my examples from there:
I could go on, but...
Thing is, you have to look at what standardisation represents to the participants. It's an opportunity to gain licensing revenue from your patent portfolio, so you need to get as much of your IPR into the standard as possible.
To do this, companies often make short-term alliances (i.e., I'll vote for this technology of yours if you vote for these technologies of mine) as a means to push the process in a preferred direction.
In the case of UWB, there are two groups of companies each (probably) with significant IPR in one of the two technologies, so who stand to gain big bucks if their preferred solution is chosen. Each group is powerful enough to block the other, but not powerful enough to prevail. After a period of deadlock, this is the only real way out.
You can't even make a purely technical argument for one or other technology. OFDMA is slightly more spectrally efficient than CDMA (with the emphasis on 'slightly'), but seems better suited to 'broadcast' style applications than to 'many bidirectional paths' of communication. The differences are small, but each side can claim that they are 'right'.
As other psoters have suggested, the market will decide. The UMTS TDD mode I mentioned earlier is virtually unheard of in the marketplace: all of the major UMTS systems use WCDMA (although many of the ideas in TDD have surfaced in the Chinese TD-SCDMA standard - no surprise as Siemens was a major backer of UMTS TDD, and is now doing R&D in China for a system using similar technology).
If you remember that standardisation is politics, with interoperability as both the price and outcome of the political process, then you won't be far wrong.