Ultrawideband May Stall Before It Starts

judgecorp writes "The IEEE's group for faster Wi-Fi, 802.11n has reached the end-point, with the Intel-backed TGn Sync proposal taking the lead. This is a contrast to the ultrawideband world 802.15.3a, where the competing proposals are slugging it out. Indeed, the vendors could be in for more trouble than they expect getting UWB past regulators in Europe." From the article: "Within the next two years, we should start to see fast wireless links based on ultrawideband (UWB), taking the place of short-range connections such as USB and Firewire, and providing fast data links between consumer goods. Chipmakers are now on the verge of creating the silicon, and vendor groups are completing the standards.But the technology may have trouble getting a world market, as regulators wrestle with the objections of the cellphone industry. UWB standards are in deadlock at the IEEE; but what the regulators say matters far more to the future of the technology."

Comments

Fast Release

[superpulpsicle]

802.11n faster than 100 Mbit/s. Are we for real here. Isn't this the 4th protocol released in 2 years? Why don't we wait just another year for 1000 Mbit/s.

Re:Fast Release

[timeOday]

that's the only thing I can think of at the moment that will actually allow a qualitative change in the power of wireless technology - everything else is just bigger-numbers-BS.

Well I disagree. The problem is that in Wireless there are often some number of users sharing the airwaves, so what starts off sounding like a big number diminishes quickly.

Plus, if you want to use repeaters to extend the range (e.g. wireless mesh), the total bandwidth required is multiplied once again.

When a trainload of people can all watch different streaming video feeds on their way to work, then maybe we can talk about "good enough."

Security

[SeaFox]

Wont this lead to lots of overhead on the connections for encryption/security? If everyone is using wireless to connect all their printers, keyboards, mice, ect, there exists a very real threat of data theft over the air, especially with the range of WiFi compared to existing Bluetooth devices. Forget spyware keyloggers on your machine, how about ones across the street!

We'll need a secure channel of communications for every device, even one as low bandwidth consumption as a keyboard.

Re:Why are you listening?

[imsabbel]

because there is an installed base of about 1.5 billion devices that may be affected by ill effects of new wireless standarts?

Re:Why are you listening?

[bostonsoxfan]

It is the power of the purse. These industries and companies pay millions into politics just so they can get special consideration in situations like these.

I want to know about the costs of this, and the relative power here because if I need to be with ten feet to use it at 100Mbit/s then there really is no point.

What end-point?

[Wesley Felter]

The "end-point" of the IEEE standards process is when the standard is issued, which is probably a year away in the case of 802.11n. The fact that one proposal is inching ahead of another in the voting is notable, but there's still plenty of work to be done.

Because of Radio Interference

[billstewart]

Spectrum Regulators have two reasons for justifying their existence - (1) protecting monopolies of the politically well-connected, and (2) preventing new equipment from interfering with existing equipment. Since this article isn't intended to be flamebait, I'll leave the first along (:-) The EU's response to the wireless part of the late 90s technology boom was to auction off their spectrum to the EU cellphone carriers, who spent $100 Billion trying to outbid each other for the opportunity to become 3G-powered Mozillionaires (just about when the boom was ending, helping fuel mass telecom company bankruptcy problems.) So that spectrum is very valuable to its owners, at least as a sunk cost, and anything that interferes with it is a problem, and it's the regulators' job to protect the spectrum they've sold.

Of course, UWB technology is designed to pretty much not interfere with anything else, and it's far better at it than WiFi, which has already annoyed the regulatory environment by being wildly successful in large part *because* its development isn't limited by regulators. So 99% of the "interference" is "people might buy UWB instead of 3G", but that's expressed in technical terms of "they might garble a few bits on our services which are fairly robust, have built-in ECC, and run TCP protocols which detect and correct for errors", so the 3G owners ask for unreasonably low power levels for UWB and the regulators go along with them. In reality, the equipment will probably have user-adjustable signal levels, they'll get type-approved with the Eurocrat settings, and users will immediately crank them up to US power levels, which still won't bother anybody.

This says it all

[iminplaya]

FTA: The problem is, those speaking for the telecoms industry sometimes find themselves arguing for more stringent controls on UWB devices than on "unintentional radios", ordinary electronic equipment - or even from the thermal radiation produced by human beings. This tends to irritate the vendors and UWB proponents, as it seems to suggest that the European mobile industry is not objecting to the noise - but the simple fact that people are communicating without their say-so.
Emphasis mine.

Re:Interference issues: raising the N in SNR

[katharsis83]

Yeah UWB does raise the noise floor for a large swathe of the spectrum (The reason it does this, and I'm referring to the impulse radio version of UWB, is that it transmists using impulses, which is spread out all over the place in terms of the freq. domain). So what you have is a little bit of added noise over all the licensed channels.

Now, how traditional communications channels work is they transmit at higher frequencies, but concentrate their energy in a small slice of that frequency - hopefully the part they're licensed in; the additional noise energy UWB adds is very very minute in a single frequency range (UWB has incredibly low power spectral density by design; the energy of the signal is spread over a huge spectrum) that traditional wireless works in, b/c these guys are blasting all their energy in that one small frequency gap, so the added noise isn't noticable to traditional licensed channels.

I get the feeling that much of the opposition to UWB is more out of paranoia.