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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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Actually it was a terrible thing. It cost ISPs more money and forced them to decide which to support or to support both (even more money). Then after v90 came out the ISPs then again had to upgrade their modem banks (unless firmware upgrade was available) and end users once again are buying new modems since MOST EUs dont do firmware upgrades, etc. Then it left KFLEX users on X2 isps with 33.6 unless they get ANOTHER modem or ANOTHER isp. So "No, not really." isn't the case.
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I don't know, with good equipment, it wasn't so bad. We kept two numbers. One was for the V.90 bank, one was for the k56flex bank. While the main bank was more reliable for those in the boonies, and went to V.90 fairly well, the k56flex never really failed us, and generally had fantastic speed and reliability for those with semi-modern lines.
- oZ
// i am here.
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.
The so-called Multiband OFDM Alliance appears to be rather counter to the whole point of OFDM. OFDM is extremely efficient with the frequency band it has to fit in, and doesn't need to be blasted over the whole spectrum to achieve high data rates. There are gigabit wireless networks already in the works (and an ITU standard), aimed as an upgrade to the existing 802.11 stuff.
Plain ordinary OFDM/COFDM is here today - it actually works right now, is in wide spread consumer use, and doesn't mess up band allocation like UWB does. You're right in that the only reason UWB is being proposed is to support a patent regime centered around Intel and the deceptive scumbags at Time Domain (UWB is not a magic system which uses no spectrum - it uses all of it and spectrum allocation is there for a good reason). I'm pretty sure OFDM will have data rates far exceeding even the theoretical maximums of UWB, far before UWB oozes out of the lab and into the unfortunate consumers' hands.
You should see how little code (relatively speaking) it takes to decode (and encode!) OFDM, and how little spectrum you need.
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.
Motorola bought the company XtremeSpectrum which brought with them a complete DS-CDMA system. So any patents in UWB that Motorola has came with the purchase of XtremeSpectrum. As for other patents in CDMA perhaps you've heard of a company called Qualcomm that basically has them all.
As to the merits of OFDM over CDMA, both techniques are fighting the same physically limitations, and so well engineered versions of either technique should have similar limitations. If you look at the maturity of the two proposals perhaps DS-CDMA is even technically better, especially in the inter-piconet interference. MBOA uses time hopping in three 500MHz bands, with ramdon time hopping to seperate the piconets. DS-CDMA uses the combination of different codes and slightly different frequencies, that causes a rotation of the codes, to seperate the piconets. I have no reason to think that MBOA couldn't be re-engineered to have similar inter-piconet performance however.
You really should understand a bit more about the technology before making blanket statements like the one you did.
(Posting anonymously, because yes I do work in UWB for one of the companies involved and my views don't represent my employers)