Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.