California researchers predict big things with no timeline for UWB: Ultrawideband (UWB) has the potential to offer vast bandwidth over long distances with little interference among devices and the ability to cope with all sorts of obstacles. But it's not in the field yet, and the first UWB-based devices using the first FCC approval (30 feet, 100 Mbps) aren't due out potentially til Christmas 2004 in consumer electronics.
Of course, if UWB can prove to have the capabilities in the real world without the problems that critics contend could erupt, then it's a natural physical layer replacement for spread-spectrum.
The report also predicts huge things for Zigbee, a standard designed to facilitate low-power configuration networking among devices. That's low bandwidth remote controls, more or less, that would let equipment coordinate among themselves instead of requiring massive numbers of infrared keypads.