Wireless wildcard
Thursday, 19 February 2004 12:23 EST
While everyone is talking about public WiFi hotspots and faster 802.11 standards, the next wildcard in wireless networking is Ultra Wideband (UWB). Promising rated transmission speeds as high as 500 megabits per second, UWB will be good for bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming video over short distances. Don't expect much action for a while yet, though. There is still no formal standard for UWB and commercial products are a year or three away.
In February 2002, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. authorized commercial use of UWB technology without licences. A group of companies called the Ultra Wideband Working Group is promoting the technology. The IEEE 802.15.3 standards committee is working on a wireless physical-layer standard for UWB, which is to be called 802.15.3a and will probably be ratified sometime late next year or in 2005.
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