God and Ultra-Wideband in the Home

Does God want ultra-wideband (UWB) in the home?  We think so.

TZero made headlines this week as their PR people placed a nice story in the Wall Street Journal (don't know why they couldn't do it for us) about how its Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology can be used to move video around the home. 

Really? Uh.....we don't think so.

The ultimate application of UWB in the home is for high-speed, short range wireless connectivity between multimedia components or to replace BlueTooth as THE personal area network (PAN) technology of choice - NOT as an in-home multimedia distribution mechanism.

In Europe it is unclear that UWB is even allowed as well as in a number of countries around the world.  In the US it is severely limited in power rendering it a PAN technology. It's also common knowledge that UWB suffered from link stability problems if the path is physically interrupted such as a person passing through the signal path.

While the chips claim to be cheap, the designs aren't - since manufacturers can't use standard PCB material and must use the high performance material and parts.

There is merely too much momentum in the Wi-Fi market, from major chip vendors such as Broadcom, Marvell, Atheros and Intel, for Wi-Fi to be usurped by UWB in the home relative to whole-home multimedia distribution.

Moreover, Wi-Fi has massive grassroots popularity, an established user and device-base and better reach to deliver whole-house connectivity. Here's a UWB primer that helps prove these beliefs.

UWB works by sending billions of very short pulses thus occupying very wide spectrum of frequencies several GHz in bandwidth. To recover the data, a UWB receiver then translates the pulses by listening for a familiar pulse sequence.

Specifically, UWB is defined as any radio technology having a spectrum that occupies a bandwidth greater than 20 percent of the center frequency, or a bandwidth of at least 500 MHz.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mandated that UWB radio transmissions can legally operate in the range from 3.1 GHz up to 10.6 GHz, at a limited transmit power of -41dBm/MHz.  This limits the theoretical (laws of physics can't be overcome via technology) range. 

This chart says (click on it) it all, as does this report.  Basically they show how quickly UWB drops from peak data rates to below Wi-Fi rates.  802.11n would multiply the plotted WiFi performance by the number of spatial streams (but it has it's own problems)

This is why UWB only makes sense at very short distances and is destined to remain a PAN technology.  UWB will likely end up replacing the BlueTooth phy.  Whole-home coverage will require an additional networking technology, such as cable, or power line or mesh networking from room to room.

To the best of our biased and limited-knowledge, no Wimedia multi-band OFDM products have passed FCC and thus current demos should be treated with ”a grain of anything."

Since UWB will obviously involve antennas and software, our Beamflex (smart antenna) and Smartcast (QoS) technology will add value - in the event that (if God allows it) UWB actually proves itself in the marketplace and manages to displace Wi-Fi.

For now we’ll assume that will never happen, despite God's mercy.