News & Analysis
Report: Ultrawideband dies by 2013
Rick Merritt
5/4/2009 1:50 AM EDT
"UWB solutions in the CE segment will be gone by 2012," predicted Brian O'Rourke, principal analyst covering the sector in his latest report. "Similarly, UWB solutions will be gone from the PC segment by 2013," he wrote.
"By 2013, the only UWB solutions still on the market will be proprietary solutions in the industrial/medical segment. All other UWB will be gone by the end of the forecast period" in 2013, he added.
O'Rourke forecasted a shakeout among UWB startups last fall. Following the economic downturn, that shakeout came in spades.
WiQuest folded in October. Staccato Communications and Artimi merged to pool resources in November. PulseLink slashed staff down to a bare bones operation late last year. Tzero closed in February, followed by Radiospire. The WiMedia Alliance, the UWB industry group, will end operations later this year.
"I was pretty bullish on UWB's prospects for a long time, but no one seems to agree with me," said O'Rourke in a late April interview. "I am starting to think [UWB's] time may have passed," he said.
"The Wireless USB crowd is imploding," said Tan Rao, co-founder and the first chief executive of Radiospire. "Those still in existence are hunkering down, and I don't see a lot of traction. They have a lot of competition from 802.11n which is doing a lot of what the WiMedia Alliance promised," he said.
Three UWB startups remain—Alereon, Staccato and Wisair. They claim the technology will find its way next-generation notebooks debuting in 2010 as well as a variety of peripherals.
The USB Implementers Forum said it will release in June a new version of the wireless USB spec that is based on ultrawideband. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is discussing plans for using UWB as a future high bandwidth transport.
In his report, O'Rourke predicted 802.11n will be the big winner in next-generation wireless networks capable of handing high def video.
More than 100 million systems will have high def capable wireless links this year rising to nearly 800 million units by 2013, O'Rourke predicted, the vast majority of them based on 802.11n.
The two leading contenders include the wireless home digital interface (WHDI) based on a proprietary variant of 802.11 from startup Amimon and 60 GHz technology called WirelessHD from startup SiBeam. Taken together they will only ship about one million units this year, rising to about 13 million units in 2013, O'Rourke forecasts.
"WHDI and WirelessHD are new, expensive, power-hungry technologies that are being promoted by start-ups, which is not generally a recipe for quick market success. We expect them to be adopted slowly over the length of the forecast," O'Rourke said.
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Rick Merritt
5/4/2009 2:04 AM EDT
Do you know of any significant wireless USB designs in the works? If UWB fades now, when might it stage a comeback?
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gafisher..1
5/15/2009 6:27 AM EDT
The death knell tolled for UWB when the FCC redefined the concept to mean "multiple narrow bands." UWB became the technological equivalent of what the media call a "partial-birth abortion," and a botched one at that.
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zei
5/27/2009 4:14 AM EDT
Bluetooth was also announced to be dead - is it? It is not, because a few innovative companies survived the battle for the market. The same will happen for UWB. The reason is that there a very easy to understand advantage of UWB radio technology compared to other ones: the energy consumption per transmitted bit is extremely low! This saves battery live time for portable devices and it saves energy in general, which is on the agenda today everywhere. We talk about 5-10 times less energy consumption for the transfer of the same amount of data - so normally UWB radio technology is a must for any producer/vendor of portable devices with big amount of data storage (like Digi-Cams and Video/Audio-Devices) and it is also nice to have even for stationary devices taking into account the enormous amount of energy potentially saved by applying UWB radio technology together with appropriate protocols.
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Santhoff
5/27/2009 9:36 AM EDT
Teacher, have you been drinking the WiMedia Kool-aid? Low power is the promise of UWB however WiMedia's implementation of UWB was by no means "Low Power" at 2 to 3 watts power consumption. (It takes a lot of power to operate those Giga Bits per second+ ADC's and DAC's along with the FEC and other baseband logic blocks) compared to some of the most recent WiFi chips at less than 300mW it's hard to claim WiMedia is "Low Power" with a straight face. You do make a good point about Bluetooth with one major exception. At the time many people were declaring "Bluetooth dead", Bluetooth companies were shipping millions of Bluetooth chips annually. It just took BT longer to ramp than expected. How many WiMedia chips have really honestly shipped to date? The real number is less than a million and possibly maybe even less than 100K. Go to any major brick and mortar stores that sells electronics such as Best Buy, Radio Shack, Walmart, Target, Fry's Electronics and just try to find ANY WiMedia products. Zero.
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