Subject: [NEXTEL-1] UWB emerges as a major threat to Bluetooth

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 22:28:47 -0500

UWB emerges as a major threat to Bluetooth

Bluetooth, introduced with much fanfare three years ago, is finally taking steps (baby
steps) toward commercial viability; but it may well be running out of time to prove
itself. As we said on several occasions since late 2001, the honor for finishing
Bluetooth off will likely belong to Ultrawideband (UWB), which the FCC approved for
limited commercial use in February 2002. The impression that UWB is going to deal
Bluetooth the final blow was intensified this week in meetings in Dallas, at which
major manufacturers –- among them Intel and Sony -– were considering which
technology of those submitted to them by leading wireless communication companies
to settle on as the new standard to compete, and possibly knock out, Bluetooth. One
technology has caught everyone’s eye -– UWB. WPANs create wireless connections
in the home over short distances, which allow for synchronization among PDAs,
computers, television sets, cable TV box, etc. Allied Business Intelligence
estimates that the winning technology behind the standard, to be designated
802.15.3a, will likely generate $1.39 billion in revenue by 2007. The IEEE will not make
its decision until June at the earliest, but there is a consensus that UWB has emerged
as the clear winner from this week's meetings: The technology was used by 95
percent of the proposals submitted, according to Ben Manny, an Intel director of
wireless technology development.

UWB is simpler, cheaper, less power-hungry, and 100 times faster than
Bluetooth (currently the leading WPAN technology), adopted by makers of cell
phones and PDAs, as well as by companies such as Microsoft and Apple
Computer. To its critics, UWB might be a major source of interference in
neighboring bandwidths. Most radio transmissions operate in narrow bands of
frequency. Cell phone broadcasts, for example, use about 100MHz at a time.
The pulse of UWB, in contrast, is tens of thousands of megahertz wide and
infiltrates into bandwidth already occupied. UWB supporters say that the wave
has so little actual power that it does not pose any interference threat. Some
of the proposals companies submitted were based on UWB’s original
characteristics of a single, very wide wave. Other companies were more
innovative, submitting proposals based on breaking the wave into segments
measuring a few thousand megahertz each: XtremeSpectrum offered a
proposal which assigned the wave to two different segments of spectrum
(Motorola, which once had two different proposals in the running, backed the
XtremeSpectrum plan). Intel proposed assigning the wave to 14 different areas.
The difference between the two types of proposals is not performance -- both
would operate at about the same speed, transmitting data at 100 megabits per
second over a distance of 10 meters. Rather, some countries may place
restrictions on portions of the large swath of bandwidth that America's FCC last
year set aside for UWB.

For more information on IEEE 802.15 Working Group for WPAN, see the group's
FAQ   http://lists.fiercemarkets.com/c.html?s=69l,1yqf,8mf,fbs9,k2xy,lp64,96ow
and its Web site  http://lists.fiercemarkets.com/c.html?s=69l,1yqf,8mf,6j98,m0qz,lp64,96ow

For background information, see this report by Ben
Charny  http://lists.fiercemarkets.com/c.html?s=69l,1yqf,8mf,cfo,gm2,lp64,96ow .
For those technically inclined, see the comprehensive "A Brief History
of UWB Communications" by Robert Fontana
 http://lists.fiercemarkets.com/c.html?s=69l,1yqf,8mf,8ue6,8p6x,lp64,96ow

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