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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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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.