Intel has abandoned work on the technology behind Wireless USB.
A few years ago ultra-wideband (UWB) appeared to be the future of peripheral interconnects. Designed as a protocol-agnostic means with which to enable wireless devices, it was being heavily pushed by Intel as the technology behind Wireless USB.
If everything had gone to plan, we would have been seeing UWB devices in the market already. The fact that we haven’t is testimony enough to things not going well for the technology, and with a whimper overnight, Intel announced that it was essentially abandoning its research efforts into UWB.
EE Times has an article up about the decision, which is attributed to the difficulty involved in getting UWB up to scratch. While this included power and performance issues, the major problem with deploying ultra-wideband has also been radio spectrum allocation. This is because, by its very nature, the technology broadcasts over a spectrum greater than 500MHz as opposed to the relatively narrow bands used by Wi-Fi. This is what enables the ability to create a very high-bandwidth personal area network, and what was touted as the technology’s major advantage.
Unfortunately, large chunks of free bandwidth aren’t all that available, which would mean that different frequencies would be needed for different regulatory areas. What works in the EU would not necessarily be legal in the US or Australia. This, alone, means a mountain of complexity for both the engineers developing UWB and the regulatory bodies in charge of spectrum allocation.
Facing these kinds of mountains appears to be too much in the current economic climate. Not only has Intel given up its research, but the move comes as one major UWB startup folds, another working on software gets bought out, and concerns arise in the EE Times article that others are on the way. Considering Intel’s decision (which was made last month) involved being able to source UWB from beyond the company if need were to arise, the ailing nature of the UWB companies mean that the technology is as good as dead.
Which is an incredible shame – the prospect of a wire-free, standardised way of connecting peripherals was exciting. Especially considering that existing ‘standards’ like Bluetooth are relics from a bygone era (Bluetooth was developed in 1994) that it seems are still near impossible to get right. Unfortunately, we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
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