For more than three years, IEEE Task Group 3a has worked on the IEEE 802.15 Ultrawideband Standard, striving to arrive at consensus between two leading industry groups, the UWB Forum and the WiMedia Alliance. Finally, to no avail, the task group voted to recommend disbanding on January 17 at the IEEE 802 meeting held in Hawaii. A nearly 95% majority voted in favor of disbanding. The recommendation then was forwarded to the 802.15 working group where it was unanimously approved. The dispute has been passed to the marketplace.

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Some say the battle now is in the market place—the market will decide. Others aren’t certain because the battle has been in the marketplace and has been raging for a long time. Both sides have gained traction, and the game seems far from over.

Following the disbanding of the task group, the UWB Forum and the WiMedia Alliance issued a joint statement, "As the industry organizations dedicated to productization, we thank all contributing TG3a members and voters for their respective efforts during the past three years. However, we concur that, at this stage in UWB market development, a more prudent course of action is necessary to allow the market to move forward with the commercialization of multiple UWB technologies."

Each side remains committed to its technologies and is pressing forward. The UWB Forum is marketing a Direct Sequence (DS) UWB technology that is incompatible with the Multi-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) technology of the WiMedia Alliance. While performances may be comparable, products made with the two technologies will not be compatible or interoperable.

The UWB Forum, led by Freescale, is an industry organization comprised of leading semiconductor, software, OEM/ODM and consumer product companies dedicated to ensuring that Ultrawideband products from multiple vendors are truly interoperable—from mobile phones to set-top boxes, from computers to televisions to digital camcorders and more.

The WiMedia Alliance is a not-for-profit open industry association that promotes and enables the rapid adoption, regulation, standardization and multi-vendor interoperability of ultrawideband (UWB) worldwide. WiMedia UWB is optimized for wireless personal-area networks delivering high-speed (480 Mbps and beyond), low-power multimedia capabilities for the PC, CE, mobile and automotive market segments. Alereon, Intel, Staccato and Wisair lead the WiMedia Alliance with an impressive list of consumer-company members.

With two strong factions unable to agree on a single technology for global UWB standardization, consumers are left to fend for themselves. Buyers must beware of compatibility issues, especially in cases where a new wireless component is purchased to join an existing UWB system, such as an UWB wireless USB network. However, consumers learn quickly, and incompatibility is no stranger to anyone. Further, most consumers don’t really care what technology is used—just so it works. For them, greater issues are availability and cost. Some things never change.

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