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« This Man Has Got Plans | Main | Ethernet Gains Power »

March 17, 2004

Ultrawideband Split Deepens

The split between Motorola and the Multi-Band OFDM Alliance (MBOA) has deepened in recent days: The MBOA stated several days ago that they would be pursuing their own track independent of the IEEE 802.15.3a task group in which the UWB standard for high-speed short-range (10 meters or less) networking was mired. The split deepened this week as noted in two reports.

On Monday, the EE Times reported that Motorola has changed its proposal: Motorola is returning to the 802.15.3a task group a modified version of its direct sequence approach that has substantially higher throughput at very short ranges while still meeting the 10 meters/110 Mbps goal set by the group. At two meters, Motorola can exceed a gigabit per second. Motorola claims that this is the sweet spot for the kinds of applications to which UWB will be placed, like streaming video in home entertainment.

Meanwhile, the MBOA has revised its own standard farther away from the 802.15.3a draft: Their revision makes it much less likely that there will ever be interoperability by adding features at the MAC layer that handles addressing. This will make it easier to run ad hoc networks and mesh UWB systems. However, the MAC layer for 802.15.3a was already agreed to be the main 802.15.3 standard.

The conclusion is that we'll have two competing, incompatible UWB standards which will fight it out in the marketplace. Consumers lose: if you buy equipment from different consumer electronics makers that use different UWB standards, you'll be out of luck. I imagine that an MBOA brand will appear on MBOA-based gear, however, and Motorola will decide on their own name.

This is not to say that Motorola can fight it out against the 80 firms in the MBOA; Richard Bennett, a MAC designer involved in many wireless task groups including 802.15.3a, thinks that Motorola's already lost the battle for the consumer market.

But Motorola will ship product and that will cause confusion in the marketplace even if they ultimately succumb to the weight of the MBOA. Motorola also owns patents via its purchase of early UWB developer XtremeSpectrum. In the IEEE process, the MBOA would have been able to license patents used in 802.15.3a under reasonable and customary terms; in fact, all parties had signed such agreements or agreed in principle.

There's no deal of that sort outside of that standards process, so MBOA's UWB, even with its different design, could become mired in litigation as Motorola fights a rearguard action.

Remember that Motorola was one of the firms to continue to support Wi-Fi's one-time competitor for the consumer market, HomeRF, long after most companies (including Intel) had given it a pass.

2 TrackBacks

Important new technology from Mossback's Progress on March 17, 2004 4:20 PM

I haven't been writing about technology lately because I don't want to give away what I'm working on. But this article is worthy of comment because it relates to a watershed moment in networking. The MBOA, a consortium of 80+ networking and consumer el... Read More

Ultrawideband Split Deepens from Telematique, water and fire. on March 26, 2004 10:26 AM

Of course we love standards... Read More