The Ruckus Room

UWB: The Naked Truth

In the wake of all T-Zero's "big news" it looks like the are finally admitting they were wrong.

For awhile they’ve been juxtaposing UWB against new "smart Wi-Fi" as a high performance wireless whole-home networking technology. Bad move.

Now they’re changing their tune, trying to create a ruckus (not the movie) around UWB as the ideal wireless extension to multimedia over coax (MOCA or HPNA). Good move. Wrong technology.

Here’s the naked truth:

• UWB won’t be an IEEE standard
  The IEEE disbanded UWB efforts earlier this year. This is a non starter for carriers that all require a standards-based products.
• UWB will *always* be a short-range (read 10 meter) thing
  The FCC has placed strict limits on UWB transmit power. And Europe is worse. So you either have high throughput or long distance - you can't have both. Period.
• UWB is one hand clapping (no client support)
  Wi-Fi is already everywhere, in everything.  UWB isn't. And that's not going to change anytime soon.
• Interference galore
  UWB will interfere with itself – especially if it’s deployed in pockets within different parts of a home. If carriers augment HPNA with wireless, they shoud use smart 802.11 that avoids interference. It’s a no brainer.
• QoS without the Q or the S (are you kidding?)
  If you combine UWB with MOCA/HPNA you move back and forth from one physical layer (PHY) media access control (MAC) to another PHY MAC and back again, how do you guarantee QoS?  Answer? You don’t. Ooooooooh OK. Wi-Fi can replace both and doesn’t have this problem.
• Management 101
  T-Zero, one of the biggest UWB spewers, makes chips, not systems. Carriers need systems, not chips - and systems they can actually manage.
• Consumers are price sensitive
  Wireless needs to be low cost (read inexpensive). To get that low cost you need volume and competition. UWB has neither. Wi-Fi has both.

So why reinvent the wheel? With existing 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi and newer 802.11n Wi-Fi, carriers and consumers get everything they want. All this said, there’s one absolute truth here: there will most often ALWAYS be a Wi-Fi network in the house. Consumers (and Intel) are seeing to that. So why not use it for everything...if it works?

Today, with consumer Wi-Fi, it doesn’t.  But we’ve changed all that.  That's why we were chosen by the World Economic Forum as a 2007 Technology Pioneer. Enough chest beating...you get the point.

We Finally Got One!

And it was worth the wait!

We've been using the new AmiNET 130 (as well as the Wegener STB) for about a week now and they rock.

The Amino, still a bit clumsy to configure, is popular because of its small form-factor and cool design. The 130 is bigger than the 110 (almost twice the size but still smaller than most of the STBs out there) because it has now supports HDMI, compact AVC, USB, optical, S-Video, Ethernet and coax interfaces as well as a regular phone jack. Wow. It supports MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (as well as MPEG-2) HD at 720p and 1080i resolutions.

It also has a bunch more horsepower. To decode MPEG-4 you need a lot of processing power. The Amino 130 has a 300 MIPS hardware codec on board.

Despite all the press releases and tradeshow demos, we've had the hardest time finding an MPEG-4 set top box. We've desperately wanted one because it lets us show multiple (read 3) HD streams over  802.11a/g. That seems to be the bar that the domestic (U.S.) carriers have set for market entry.

We've been simultaneously running multiple HD MPEG-4 streams through the Amino 130 to different TVs. We used our HD free-to-air antenna on our roof to even capture the 2006 Victoria Secret Runway show. We transcoded it (using QuickTime Pro) to MPEG-4 and have been streaming it all week (the engineers won't let us turn it off).  And boy does it look fabulous. The data rate on the stream is only 6 Mbps. So we can simultaneously stream three HD channels easily over 802.11a/g.

While there's a bunch of interest in 802.11n (us included) to push top line Wi-Fi capacity up - it comes at a big cost. But with MPEG-4, operators get some serious relief and the ability to start offering HD IPTV...NOW!

Who Wants To Network?

Today's value propositions for getting connected are becoming compelling to the point where you almost can't say no. 

Free Wi-Fi in Mountain View?  Come on....log me on.

Community, "grass-roots networking" efforts are the new big thing (or an old thing if you know how the Internet was created).

Think of it like (I said LIKE) the peer-to-peer networking models of Morpheus and Kazaa that allow other people to download songs on your computer IF you use their software. And you get to do the same.  But these things are aimed at broadband access and networking.

These new grassroots models leverage large amounts of people and unused bandwidth to provide free (or super low-cost) Wi-Fi, voice services and other useful content services - giving users free Wi-Fi, free equipment (sometimes) and free phone services (notice I didn't say free sex). But users (usually) must agree to deploy certain equipment and make it available to others.

The latest is Meraki. They make a super low-cost (sub $50) Wi-Fi mesh AP that sits in the consumer's home and enables "community Wi-Fi." Google has apparently invested in them. Each device can communicate (wirelessly) to another device in a nearby home and so on - ultimately enabling a huge community mesh network.

Meraki spun out of the RoofNet group at MIT. Their core strength is in designing very efficient routing protocols and rate adaptation algorithms for mesh networks. But, according to insiders, they do not design any specialized hardware. The idea is to use multiple hops to gain coverage area, rather than optimizing receive sensitivity or antenna gain to increase range for individual nodes. They initially wanted to focus on enabling a new breed of ISPs that bridge between the backbone mesh and a hotzone-type of neighborhood.

The idea of grassroots efforts in the network services biz was popularized by FON which characterizes itself as "the largest Wi-Fi community network in the world"  Fon makes money by charging a usage fee to "Aliens" for day passes which can be used to connect to the Internet through a Fon access point. "Bills" are also charged a reduced usage fee when they connect to the Internet though another user's router.  Here's more detail on how FON works.

Where government regulation prohibits innovation and where private enterprise make it cost prohibitive, technology can and will enable a true revolution.  If people want something, technology will make it possible.  Voice over the Internet has made voice free where phone companies and government never could.

While who knows whether Meraki and FON will succeed but they're certainly on the right track with more to come.  Technology will ultimately empower people to have a voice that can't be stopped. 

Now if we can just apply this technology to reducing taxes.