On The Verge

Both of the warring UWB (Ultra Wideband) factions made news in the last week with the UWB Forum moving to establish a sharing scheme for the air channel, and the WiMedia Alliance appearing open to overtures to link up with the Bluetooth community. I’m not sure of the significance of the Bluetooth marriage, but I’m calling for the WiMedia group to consider cooperating in the UWB Forum’s cooperative effort.

Sorry for getting to this story late and for the lack of posts recently, but I’ve been totally focused on producing the second edition of EDN’s Global Report that’s due in print this summer.

For the WiMedia group (the recent combination of the MBOA and the original WiMedia alliance), it appears the strategy is numbers – as in numbers of supporters. First the group announced that Microsoft (PDF) had joined the alliance. A few days later, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced its intention to work with the WiMedia Alliance and essentially to use UWB as the basis for next-generation Bluetooth. Later in the day WiMedia accepted the proposal, but it’s still pretty fuzzy as to how the two will match up other than in name. The Bluetooth group claims that they will ensure backwards compatibility, but doing so will require two completely different radios as the schemes are inherently different. Moreover, it’s not clear how the duo will differentiate what Intel wants to call Wireless USB from what may be labeled Bluetooth X.0.

The UWB Forum made more substantive news. A company called Pulse~Link, (see “Another UWB scheme – but in a WLAN flavor”) has developed yet a third UWB scheme but last week joined the UWB Forum. Pulse~Link has also advocated the creation of an air-channel allocation scheme that ensures that incompatible UWB radios can work in the presence of one another. Last summer, I covered the proposal in “Regulating Time” and I still believe that either the FCC or the industry groups should take on the task of interoperability. Now the UWB Forum is establishing such an effort via the CSM (Common Signaling Mode) working group that will be led by Pulse~Link CTO John Santhoff.

I believe that the WiMedia Alliance owes it to the industry to participate in CSM. If in fact the WiMedia technology is superior, then it will win the majority of the market in any event. If the group doesn’t participate, and we end up with relatively low-performance wireless peripherals interfering with wireless video distribution in a home, then we all, as consumers, lose.

For more background on UWB see, “UWB factions disagree on waiver significance,” and “UWB Forum technology hits the handset.”