IEEE gives up on UWB standard

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has given up trying to formulate an ultra wide band (UWB) standard and has left it to the producers to sort things out among themselves.

Yesterday the 802.15.3a Task Group (TG3a) held two votes, one to abandon its search for a standard and another to dissolve itself.

During the course of its existence the TG3a reduced the number of competing standards from 23 to two: MultiBand Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing UWB, supported by the WiMedia Alliance, and Direct Sequence-UWB, supported by the UWB Forum. 

The WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum issued the following statement: "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 commercialisation of multiple UWB technologies."

The two technologies differ significantly and cannot interoperate. The two groups made up the 75 per cent supermajority votes needed to dissolve the working group, making future co-operation unlikely.

UWB is a high bandwidth radio signal similar to Bluetooth but designed for consumer devices. Intel and Microsoft are part of the WiMedia Alliance, while the UWB Forum lists Motorola, Samsung and Sony among its members.