Global Designer: WiCon panel opines on state of wireless standards

At the WiCon (Wireless Connectivity) World show in London in May, Mike McCamon, executive director of the UWB Forum (www.uwbforum.org), described as "an utter mess" the current situation of competing personal-wireless-connectivity standards. Partially giving rise to the description was the Bluetooth Special Interest Group's (www.bluetooth.com) May 2005 announcement that it intends to work with developers of UWB (ultrawideband) technology to "combine the strengths of both technologies." McCamon likens the proliferation of standards to the situation in wired networking around 1990. He looks toward a similar simplification in the same way that IP (Internet Protocol) came to dominate networking technology, anticipating that the wireless industry should be able to "clean up" the situation.

The UWB Forum stands on one side of the continuing UWB-standards wrangle, and the MBOA (Multiband OFDM Alliance) stands on the other. Nevertheless, Kursat Kimayacioglu, MBOA marketing- group member and director of wireless business development for the connectivity-business line at Philips (www.philips.com), echoes the sentiment. He looks to a more unified wireless environment in which the Bluetooth profile becomes just one of a number using the UWB-air interface.

The show provided a snapshot of progress toward functional UWB in its native mode; Freescale (www.freescale.com) operated a streaming-video demonstration with a claimed 100-Mbps link spanning 15 to 20m. This demonstration employed the first multichip implementation of its direct-sequence UWB silicon, and the company promises further integration. Visitors could also see file transfer over a wireless-USB link using first silicon of Staccato Communications' (www.staccatocommunications.com) single-chip all-CMOS offering. Staccato envisages the technology's reaching the market on a time scale that would see external adapters for file transfer from PC to external hard drive early in 2006 and reaching high-end mobile-phone platforms in 2007.

Wireless Connectivity World, www.wiconworld.com.